A possible cause for the origin of the tradition of the Flood / by Joseph Prestwich.

  • Prestwich, Joseph, 1812-1896.
Date:
[1891]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A possible cause for the origin of the tradition of the Flood / by Joseph Prestwich. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    generally cemented by calcite. The bones are mostly broken and splintered into innumerable sharp fragments, and evidently arc not those of animals devoured by beasts of prey; nor have they been broken by man. It is not possible to suppose that animals of such different natures, and of such different habitats, could in life ever have herded together. Difficult as the alternative is, I see no other explanation of the phenomena than that of a wide-spread temporary sub- mergence, accompanied by strong earth tremors. In such a case it is easy to conceive that as the waters gradually advanced over the low lands, the animals of the plains would naturally seek safety on the higher grounds and hills. Fly- ing in terror, and cowed by the common danger, the Ruminants and other Herbivores, together with the Carni- vores, would, as in the case of the flooding in our days of large deltas, alike seek refuge on the same safety spot. Where that spot was an isolated hill, they would, if it were not out of reach of the flood waters, eventually suffer the same fate. Subsequently the detached limbs and bones, carried, as the land rose again, together with the surface debris, by the effluent currents into the open fissures, were subjected to the clashing of the rubble and the fall of large fragments of rock from the sides of the fissures—whence the reason of their having been so generally crushed and broken. An early French geologist—an able and acute observer— after noting the presence of land shells and bones in a state of disorder in the Ossiferous Fissures of Nice was led incidentally to remark that they seenied as if thrown in by an angry sea invading the land. Gibraltar.* The Atlantic waves have left few traces of Raised Beaches and “ head” on the Western Coasts of Spain and Portugal, but on the Rock of Gibraltar there are traces of several such beaches, covered in places by local angular rubble (or head). This nibble extends over the lower slopes of the Rock on both sides. On the Western side it is pro- jected 550 yards seaward at an angle of 8° to 9° (sometimes even less) and attains a thickness of 100 feet. It is clearly not a talus, nor is it a cone of dejection. Its origin has been referred to two periods of severe cold and snow slides. The * Sir A. Ramsay and Prof. Jas. Geikie, Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc vok xxxiv, p. 5l)5. G. Busk, Trans. Zool. Soc. vol. x, pt. 2.