When, however, the doctor passes to argument based upon natural science, we find what he adduces worthy of our attention, were it but for the inquiries which it suggests. "If the deluge were but local," we find him saying, "what was the need of taking _birds_ into the ark; and among them birds so widely diffused as the raven and the dove? A deluge which could overspread the region which these birds inhabit could hardly have been less than universal. If the deluge were local, and all the birds of these kinds in that district perished,--though we should think they might have fled to the uninundated regions,--it would have been useless to encumber the ark with them, seeing that the birds of the same species which survived in the lands not overflowed would speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters subsided." It will be found that the reasoning here is mainly based upon an error in natural science, into which even naturalists of the last century, such as Buffon, not unfrequently fell, and which was almost universal among the earlier voyagers and travellers,--the error of confounding as identical the merely allied birds and beasts of distant countries, and of thus assigning to _species_ wide areas in creation which in reality they do not occupy. The grouse, for instance, is a widely spread genus, or rather _family_; for it consists of more genera than one. It is so extensively present over the northern hemisphere, that Siberia, Norway, Iceland, and North America, have all their grouse,--the latter continent, indeed, from five to eight different kinds; and yet so restricted are some of the species of which they consist, that, were the British islands to be submerged, one of the best known of the family,--the red grouse, or moor-fowl (_Lagopus Scoticus_),--would disappear from creation. This bird, which, rated at its money value, is one of the most important in Europe,--for the barren moors which it frequents in the Highlands of Scotland alone are let every season almost entirely for its sake for hundreds of thousands of pounds,--is exclusively a British bird; and, unless by miracle a new migratory instinct were given to it, a complete submersion of the British islands would secure its destruction. If the submergence amounted to but a few hundred miles in lateral extent, the moor-fowl would to a certainty not seek the distant uninundated land. Nor is it at all to be inferred, that in a merely local but wide spread deluge, birds occupying a more extensive area than that overspread by the Flood would, according to Dr. Kitto, "speedily replenish the inundated tract as soon as the waters had subsided." The statement must have been hazarded in ignorance of the peculiar habits of many of the non-migratory birds. Up till about the middle of the last century, the capercailzie, or great cock of the woods, was a native of Scotland. It was exterminated, however, about the time of the last Rebellion, or not long after: the last specimen seen