branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden. No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl (Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and gold and shell wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth. On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some constructive arts--a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works of the Assyrians and Egyptians. 3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here, as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a _local_ convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors,[103] and which inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light, the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence, and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet below the level of the ocean,[104] and which was probably much more extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the deluge was known and accessible in his time: "Hast thou marked the ancient way Which wicked men have trodden, Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment, And whose foundations a flood swept away?" --Job xxii., 15.