Poole wrote nearly two centuries ago. In more recent times, we find authorities equally eminent for learning and candor adopting the same views. "Interpreters," says Dathe, "do not agree whether the deluge inundated the whole earth, or only those regions then inhabited. I adopt the latter opinion. The phrase _all_ does not prove the inundation to have been universal. It appears that in many places [Hebrew] (_kol_) is to be understood as limited to the thing or place spoken of. Hence all the animals said to have been introduced into the ark were only those of the region inundated. So, also, only those mountains are to be understood, which were surmounted by the waters."--_Pentateuchus a Dathio_, p. 63. But no modern writer has treated this subject with so much candor and ability--and the same may be said of his whole work on the "Relation of the Holy Scriptures to some Parts of Geological Science"--as Dr. John Pye Smith. We can say of him, what we can say of very few men, that he is accurately acquainted with all the branches of the subject. Eminent as a theologian and a philologist, and fully possessed of all the facts in geology and natural history, he gives us his opinion, not as a young man, fond of novelties, but in the full maturity of judgment and of years. "From these instances," says he, "of the scriptural idiom in the application of phraseology similar to that in the narrative concerning the flood, I humbly think that those terms do not oblige us to understand a literal universality; so that we are exonerated from some otherwise insuperable difficulties in natural history and geology. If so much of the earth was overflowed as was occupied by the human race, both the physical and the moral ends of that awful visitation were answered."--_Scrip. and Geol._ p. 214, 4th ed.