plain suggestion flowing out of that very ordinary and archaic
piece of knowledge that water cannot be piled up like in a heap,
like sand; or that it seeks the lowest level. When, after 150
days, "the fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven
were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained" (Gen.
viii.2), what prevented the mass of water, several, possibly
very many, fathoms deep, which covered, say, the present site of
Bagdad, from sweeping seaward in a furious torrent; and, in a
very few hours, leaving, not only the "tops of the mountains,"
but the whole plain, save any minor depressions, bare? How could
its subsistence, by any possibility, be an affair of weeks
and months?

And if this difficulty is not enough, let any one try to imagine
how a mass of water several perhaps very many, fathoms deep,
could be accumulated on a flat surface of land rising well above
the sea, and separated from it by no sort of barrier.
Most people know Lord's Cricket-ground. Would it not be an
absurd contradiction to our common knowledge of the properties
of water to imagine that, if all the mains of all the waterworks
of London were turned on to it, they could maintain a heap of
water twenty feet deep over its level surface? Is it not obvious
that the water, whatever momentary accumulation might take place
at first, would not stop there, but that it would dash, like a
mighty mill-race, southwards down the gentle slope which ends in
the Thames? And is it not further obvious, that whatever depth
of water might be maintained over the cricket-ground so long as
all the mains poured on to it, anything which floated there
would be speedily whirled away by the current, like a cork in a
gutter when the rain pours? But if this is so, then it is no