'Other impossibilities come forward: the insufficient dimensions of the ark to take in all the creatures; the unsuitability of the same climate to arctic and tropical animals for a full year; the impossibility of feeding them, and avoiding pestilence; and especially, the total disagreement of the modern facts of the dispersion of animals, with the idea that they spread anew from Armenia as their centre. We have no right to call in a aeries of miracles to solve difficulties of which the writer was unconscious. The ark itself was expressly devised to economise miracle, by making a fresh creation of animals needless.' Voltaire says of the deluge:-- 'We consider it as a miracle; first, because all the facts by which God condescends to interfere in the sacred books are so many miracles. 'Secondly, because the sea could not rise fifteen cubits, or one and twenty standard feet and a half above the highest mountains without leaving its bed dry, and, at the same time violating all the laws of gravity and the equilibrium of fluids, which would evidently require a miracle. 'Thirdly, because, even although it might rise to the height mentioned, the ark could not have contained, according to known physical laws, all the living things of the earth, together with their food, for so long a time; considering that lions, tigers, panthers, leopards, ounces, rhinoceroses, bears, wolves, hyenas, eagles, hawks, kites, vultures, falcons, and all carnivorous animals, which feed on flesh alone, would have died of hunger, even after having devoured all the other species. 'Fourthly, because the physical impossibilities of an universal deluge, by natural means, can be strictly demonstrated. The demonstration is as follows:-- 'All the seas cover half the globe. A common measure of their depths near the shores and in the open ocean, is assumed to be five hundred feet. 'In order to their covering both hemispheres to the depth of five hundred feet, not only would an ocean of that depth be necessary over all the land, but a new sea would, in addition, be required to envelope the ocean at present existing, without which the laws of hydrostatics would occasion the dispersion of that other new mass of water five hundred feet deep, which should remain covering the land. {25} 'Thus, then, two new oceans are requisite to cover the terraqueous globe nearly to the depth of five hundred feet. 'Supposing the mountains to be only twenty thousand feet high, forty oceans each five hundred feet in height would be required to accumulate on each other, merely in order to equal the height of the mountains. Every successive ocean would contain all the others, and the last of them all would have a circumference containing forty times that of the first. 'In order to form this mass of water, it would be necessary to create it out of nothing. In order to withdraw it, it would be necessary to annihilate it.