One other objection to the Deluge narrative perhaps deserves a word of comment--that urged against the statement of the gradual disappearance of the waters. The extraordinary difficulty is raised respecting this, that the water must have rushed seaward in a furious torrent. The objection is based apparently on the idea that the foundation for the original narrative was a river inundation in the Mesopotamian plain. This cannot be admitted; but if it were, the objection would not apply. River inundations, whether of the Nile or Euphrates, subside inch by inch, not after the manner of mountain torrents. Thus this objection is another instance of difficulties gratuitously imported into the history. In point of fact the narrator represents the Deluge as prevailing for a whole year, which would be impossible in the case of a river inundation. He attributes it in part, at least, to the 'great deep'--that is, the ocean; and he represents the ark as drifting inland or toward the north. Such conditions can be satisfied only by the supposition of a subsidence of the land similar in kind, at least, to the great post-glacial flood of geology. Partial subsidences of this kind, local but very extreme, have occurred even in later times, as, for instance, in the Runn of Cutch, the delta of the Mississippi, and the delta of the Nile; and if the objectors are determined to make the Deluge of Noah very local and more recent than the post-glacial flood, it would be more rational to refer to subsidences like those just mentioned, and of which they will find examples in Lyell's _Principles_ and other geological books. It is, however, decidedly more probable that Noah's Flood is identical with that which destroyed the men of the mammoth age, the palæocosmic or 'palæolithic' men;[57] and in that case the recession of the waters would probably be gradual, but intermittent, 'going and returning,' as our ancient narrator has it; but there need not have been any violent _débâcle_. [57] _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, chaps. iii. and iv. It is also to be noted that a submergence of the land and consequent deluge may be cataclysmic or tranquil, according to local circumstances, and that it may have been locally sudden, while for the whole world it was gradual and of longer duration. Such differences must belong to all great submergences, which may in one place produce great disturbance and very coarse deposits, in another may be quiet and deposit the finest silt. Even the flood of a river or the action of a tide admits of variations of this kind. In narrow channels the great tides of the Bay of Fundy rush as torrents; in wide bays they creep in imperceptibly.