Was there a deluge? It is not to advocate any new reconciliation theory we ask this question; it is not to urge afresh some supposed contact with a comet (if we have just passed through the tail of one, at most the harm we got was a few heavy showers); nor is it to show that periodical inundations or oceanic overwhelmings of each hemisphere—north and south—alternately take place every few thousand years. Probably they do. But neither fifty deluges, nor ten thousand, nor a hundred thousand, would make one deluge—A DELUGE. Our purpose then is, to inquire whether there might not have been, once upon a time, a physical natural cause for a deluge. As the crime of the sinner is often the cause of the amendment of the law, so the bold speculator, breaking out from the trammels of established dicta and the fashionable propriety of a safe reserve, may, as Macdougal Stuart in his daring ride across Australia opened out a luxuriant country where geographers predicted a sandy desert, likewise break in upon glorious fields before unknown. We have so many safe respectabilities in geology that an erratic notion now and then cannot do much harm, if it do no good. When we look up to the moon, what do we see? Great ocean cavities and no water in them. It is of no use to say it is ALL gathered up on the other side. We cannot believe that.