“It has been supposed that the ark rested on Mount Ararat in Armenia:  Josephus countenances this view of it, and it is interesting to observe, that the name of the Armenian city where it has been supposed the ark at last grounded, signifies the Place of Descent, from the Greek [Greek:  aporataeeion]:—­others have, however, urged that it rested upon Mount Caucasus, near Apamea, in Phrygia, from the circumstance that in Genesis xi. 2, the sons of the patriarch are represented as journeying westward from the place of descent, and Mount Ararat in Armenia being west of this country.  The language of the sacred writer does not particularly define the question.  Mount Ararat, according to Morier, is at once awful in its elevation, and beautiful in its form.  Sir Robert Ker Porter describes this celebrated mountain as divided, by a chasm of about seven miles wide, into two distinct peaks, called The Great and The Little Ararat, and is of opinion that the ark finally rested in this chasm.  This pleasing and elegant writer gives a beautiful description of Ararat.  ’I beheld Ararat in all its amplitude of grandeur.  From the spot on which I stood, it appeared as if the hugest mountains of the world had been piled upon each other, to form this one sublime immensity of earth, and rock, and snow.  The icy peaks of its double heads rose majestically into the clear and cloudless heavens; the sun blazed bright upon them, and the reflection sent forth a dazzling radiance equal to other suns.  This point of the view united the utmost grandeur of plain and height, but the feelings I experienced while looking on the mountain are hardly to be described.  My eye, not able to rest for any length of time on the blinding glory of its summits, wandered down the apparently interminable sides, till I could no longer trace their vast lines in the mists of the horizon; when an inexpressible impulse immediately carrying my eye upwards again, refixed my gaze on the awful glare of Ararat; and this bewildered sensibility of sight, being answered by a similar feeling in the mind, for some moments I was lost in a strange suspension of the powers of thought.’”

The Deluge.

“Nothing seems to be better substantiated and established than the circumfusion of the waters of the deluge.  The language of the Sacred Volume is clear and decisive on this point.  ’The waters prevailed exceedingly on the earth; and all the high hills that were under the whole heaven were covered.  Fifteen cubits upwards did the waters prevail, and the mountains were covered.’  The attestations to this fact, in organic remains, are universal, and completely conclusive.  In Italy entire skeletons of whales have been found at an elevation of not less than one thousand two hundred feet above the level of the Mediterranean.  In a letter of the 5th May, 1830, to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, M. Gerard states, that he had collected shells among the snowy mountains of the frontiers of Thibet: