was a worker in iron. Therefore, if the Noachian legend is to be
taken for the history of an event which happened in the glacial
epoch, we must revise our notions of pleistocene civilisation.
On the other hand, if the Pentateuchal story only means
something quite different, that happened somewhere else,
thousands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes of its
credit as history? I wonder what would be said to a modern
historian who asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and
then tried to justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the
Great Fire of London in 1666. Yet the attempt to save the credit
of the Noachian story by reference to something which is
supposed to have happened in the far north, in the glacial
epoch, is far more preposterous.

Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore some of the
most important and well-known facts which bear upon the
question. Anything more than a parochial acquaintance with
physical geography and geology would suffice to remind its
possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a standing protest
against bringing such a deluge as that of Noah anywhere near it,
either in historical times or in the course of that pleistocene
period, of which the "great ice age" formed a part.

Judaea and Galilee, Moab and Gilead, occupy part of that
extensive tableland at the summit of the western boundary of the
Euphrates valley, to which I have already referred. If that
valley had ever been filled with water to a height sufficient,
not indeed to cover a third of Ararat, in the north, or half of
some of the mountains of the Persian frontier in the east, but
to reach even four or five thousand feet, it must have stood