CHAPTER II
A general account of Noah's Flood; A computation what quantity of Water would be necessary for the making of it; that the common Opinion and Explication of that Flood is not intelligible.
’TIS now more than Five Thousand years since our World was made, and though it would be a great pleasure to the mind, to recollect and view at this distance those first Scenes of Nature: what the face of the Earth was when
Mersennus gives us this account of it. "It appears by our Observations, that a Cubical Vessel of Brass, whereof we made use, is fill’d an inch and an half in half an hours time; but because that sucks up nothing of the moisture as the Earth doth, let us take an inch for half an hours Rain; whence it follows, that in the space of 40 days and nights Rain, the waters in the Deluge would rise 160 feet, if the Rains were constant and equal to ours, and that it rain’d at once throughout the face of the whole Earth." But the Rain of the Deluge, saith he, should have been 90 times greater than this, to cover, for instance, the Mountains of Armenia, or to reach 15 Cubits above them. So that according to his computation, the 40 days Rain would supply little more than the hundredth part of the water requisite to make the Deluge. ’Tis true, he takes the heighth of the Mountains higher than we do; but, however, if you temper the Calculation on all sides as much as you please, the water that came by this Rain would be a very inconsiderable part of what was necessary for a Deluge. If it rain’d 40 days and 40 nights throughout the face of the whole Earth, in the Northern and Southern Hemisphere all at once, it might be sufficient to lay all the lower grounds under water, but it would signifie very little as to the overflowing of the Mountains. Whence another Author upon the same occasion hath this passage. "If the Deluge had been made by Rains only, there would not have needed 40 days, but 40 years Rain to have brought it to pass." And if we should suppose the whole middle Region condens’d into water, it would not at all have been sufficient for this effect, according to that proportion some make betwixt Air and Water; for they say, Air turn’d into Water takes up a hundred times less room than it did before. The truth is, we may reasonably suppose, that all the vapours of the middle Region were turn’d into water in this 40 days and 40 nights Rain, if we admit, that this Rain was throughout the whole