Was there ever a time when the globe was entirely inundated? It is physically impossible.

It is possible that the sea may successively have covered every land, one part after another; and even this can only have happened by very slow gradation, and in a prodigious number of centuries. In the course of five hundred years the sea has retired from Aigues-Mortes, Fréjus, and Ravenna, which were considerable ports, and left about two leagues of land dry. According to the ratio of such progression, it is clear that it would require two million and two hundred and fifty thousand years to produce the same effect through the whole circuit of the globe. It is a somewhat remarkable circumstance that this period of time nearly falls in with that which the axis of the earth would require to be raised, so as to coincide with the equator; a change extremely probable, which began to be considered so only about fifty years since, and which could not be completed in a shorter period of time than two million and three hundred thousand years.

The beds or strata of shells, which have been discovered at the distance of some leagues from the sea, are an incontestable evidence that it has gradually deposited these marine productions on tracts which were formerly shores of the ocean; but that the water should have ever covered the whole globe at once is an absurd chimera in physics, demonstrated to be impossible by the laws of gravitation, by the laws of fluids, and by the insufficient quantity of water for the purpose. We do not, however, by these observations, at all mean to impeach the truth of the universal deluge, related in the Pentateuch; on the contrary, that is a miracle which it is our duty to believe; it is a miracle, and therefore could not have been acc............