referred. After frankly admitting that the old doctrine of
universality involves physical impossibilities, he continues:--


All these difficulties fall away as soon as we give up the
universality of the Deluge, and imagine a partial
flooding of the earth, say in western Asia. But have we a right
to do so? The narrative speaks of "the whole earth." But what is
the meaning of this expression? Surely not the whole surface of
the earth according to the ideas of modern geographers,
but, at most, according to the conceptions of the Biblical
author. This very simple conclusion, however, is never drawn by
too many readers of the Bible. But one need only cast one's eyes
over the tenth chapter of Genesis in order to become acquainted
with the geographical horizon of the Jews. In the north it was
bounded by the Black Sea and the mountains of Armenia;
extended towards the east very little beyond the Tigris;
hardly reached the apex of the Persian Gulf; passed, then,
through the middle of Arabia and the Red Sea; went southward
through Abyssinia, and then turned westward by the frontiers of
Egypt, and inclosed the easternmost islands of the
Mediterranean (p. 11).


The justice of this observation must be admitted, no less than
the further remark that, in still earlier times, the pastoral
Hebrews very probably had yet more restricted notions of what
constituted the "whole earth." Moreover, I, for one, fully agree
with Professor Diestel that the motive, or generative incident,
of the whole story is to be sought in the occasionally excessive