With the myth of a life succession dissipated, a broad view of the fossil world cannot fail to convince the mind of the reality of some such cosmic convulsion, and convince it with all the force of a mathematical demonstration. Great groups of animals have dropped out of sight over all the continents, and their carcasses have been buried by sea water where we now find high plateaus or mountain ranges. Ignoring completely the abundant fossils in the so-called "older" rocks, and fixing our attention entirely on the Tertiary and Pleistocene beds that are acknowledged to be closely connected with the human race and the modern world, we still have =a problem in race extinction alone= that appalls the mind. The mammoth, rhinoceros and mastodon, together with "not less than thirty distinct species of the horse tribe," as Marsh says, =all disappear from North America at one time=, and the most ingenious disciple of Hutton and Lyell has been puzzled to invent a plausible explanation. But when we consider that at this same "geological period" =similar events were occurring on all the other continents=--the huge ground-sloths (megatheriums) and glyptodons in South America; "wombats as large as tapirs," and "kangaroos the size of elephants" in Australia; the mammoth and woolly rhinoceros in Eurasia; together with an enormous hippopotamus, as far as England is concerned, to say nothing of those great bears, lions and hyenas, with a semi-tropical vegetation, =all disappearing together at the same time=, or shifting to the other side of the world--it becomes almost like a deliberate insult to our intellectual honesty to be approached with offers of "explanations" based on any so-called "natural" action of the forces of nature. But when, in addition to all this, we consider the fact that those human giants of the caves of Western Europe were contemporary with the animals mentioned above, =and disappeared along with them at this same time=, while mountain masses in all parts of the world crowded with marine forms of the so-called "older" types positively =cannot be separated in time from the others=, it becomes as certain as any other ordinary scientific fact, like sunrise or sunset, that our once magnificently stocked world =met with some sudden and awful catastrophe in the long ago=; and is it in any way transgressing the bounds of true inductive science to correlate this event with the Deluge of the Hebrew Scriptures and the traditions of every race on earth?