and desolating floods of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

Let us, provisionally, accept the theory of a partial deluge,
and try to form a clear mental picture of the occurrence. Let us
suppose that, for forty days and forty nights, such a vast
quantity of water was poured upon the ground that the whole
surface of Mesopotamia was covered by water to a depth certainly
greater, probably much greater, than fifteen cubits, or twenty
feet (Gen. vii. 20). The inundation prevails upon the earth for
one hundred and fifty days and then the flood gradually
decreases, until, on the seventeenth day of the seventh month,
the ark, which had previously floated on its surface, grounds
upon the "mountains of Ararat"<10> (Gen. viii. 34). Then, as
Diestel has acutely pointed out ("Sintflut," p. 13), we are to
imagine the further subsidence of the flood to take place so
gradually that it was not until nearly two months and a half
after this time (that is to say, on the first day of the tenth
month) that the "tops of the mountains" became visible. Hence it
follows that, if the ark drew even as much as twenty feet of
water, the level of the inundation fell very slowly--at a rate
of only a few inches a day--until the top of the mountain on
which it rested became visible. This is an amount of movement
which, if it took place in the sea, would be overlooked by
ordinary people on the shore. But the Mesopotamian plain slopes
gently, from an elevation of 500 or 600 feet at its northern
end, to the sea, at its southern end, with hardly so much as a
notable ridge to break its uniform flatness, for 300 to 400
miles. These being the conditions of the case, the following
inquiry naturally presents itself: not, be it observed, as a
recondite problem, generated by modern speculation, but as a