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neighbouring rivers, by washing down the shores; and if you chose to
say that there were several deluges to produce these rifts and the
shells among them, you would also have to affirm that such a deluge
took place every year. Again, among the fragments of these shells,
it must be presumed that in those places there were sea coasts,
where all the shells were thrown up, broken, and divided, and never
in pairs, since they are found alive in the sea, with two valves,
each serving as a lid to the other; and in the drifts of rivers and
on the shores of the sea they are found in fragments. And within the
limits of the separate strata of rocks they are found, few in number
and in pairs like those which were left by the sea, buried alive in
the mud, which subsequently dried up and, in time, was petrified.
9
91.
And if you choose to say that it was the deluge which carried these
shells away from the sea for hundreds of miles, this cannot have
happened, since that deluge was caused by rain; because rain
naturally forces the rivers to rush towards the sea with all the
things they carry with them, and not to bear the dead things of the
sea shores to the mountains. And if you choose to say that the
deluge afterwards rose with its waters above the mountains, the
movement of the sea must have been so sluggish in its rise against
the currents of the rivers, that it could not have carried, floating
upon it, things heavier than itself; and even if it had supported
them, in its receding it would have left them strewn about, in
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