thousand years ago, may have differed to such an extent from
those which now exist that we should be able to convict him of
having made up his tale. But here again everything is in favour
of his credibility. Indeed, he may claim very powerful support,
for it does not lie in the mouths of those who accept the
authority of the Pentateuch to deny that the Euphrates valley
was what it is, even six thousand years back. According to the
book of Genesis, Phrat and Hiddekel--the Euphrates and the
Tigris--are coeval with Paradise. An edition of the Scriptures,
recently published under high authority, with an elaborate
apparatus of "Helps" for the use of students--and therefore, as
I am bound to suppose, purged of all statements that could by
any possibility mislead the young--assigns the year B.C. 4004 as
the date of Adam's too brief residence in that locality.

But I am far from depending on this authority for the age of the
Mesopotamian plain. On the contrary, I venture to rely, with
much more confidence, on another kind of evidence, which tends
to show that the age of the great rivers must be carried back to
a date earlier than that at which our ingenuous youth is
instructed that the earth came into existence. For, the alluvial
deposit having been brought down by the rivers, they must needs
be older than the plain it forms, as navvies must needs antecede
the embankment painfully built up by the contents of their
wheel-barrows. For thousands of years, heat and cold, rain,
snow, and frost, the scrubbing of glaciers, and the scouring of
torrents laden with sand and gravel, have been wearing down the
rocks of the upper basins of the rivers, over an area of many
thousand square miles; and these materials, ground to fine
powder in the course of their long journey, have slowly