Selected quad for the lemma: book_n

Word A	Word B	Word C	Word D	Occurrence	Frequency Band	MI	MI Band	Prominent
book_n	earth_n	part_n	zone_n	12	3	13.0290	5	false

Text snippets containing the quad

ID	Title	Author	Corrected Date of Publication (TCP Date of Publication)	STC	Words	Pages
A35033	Some animadversions upon a book intituled, The theory of the earth by the Right Reverend Father in God, Herbert, Lord Bishop of Hereford.	Croft, Herbert, 1603-1691.	1685 (1685)	Wing C6979; ESTC R7650	60,658	228

should cease But he will say The Water coming out from thence might overflow all the Earth especially there being also great Rains at the same time To this I Answer according to his own Rule in his first Book Chap. 2. That all the Vapours in the upper Region condensed and become solid Water do not make up the hundredth part of what it was before To this he adds another Reason there an Experiment made by a Cubical Vessel set forth to receive the Rain in four and twenty hours the Waters received do not make up an inch and an half and then computes how much Water forty days rain would cause all which he concludes would amount to very little towards the Deluge for which he requires eight Oceans If this were so little as he would have it he must have all the rest from his Sea under the Earth But then he comes upon us with his Romantick flying Rivers as he expresseth it pag. 75. which like the great Dragon in the Apocalyps with their wonderful tails swept away a great part of Mankind Yet the greater part for ought I know might still remain and escape the Deluge For I would ask him how far these flying Rivers could reach We find when a mighty stone dashes into the Water the greatest part of the Water which is raised by it flies upward though some may rise obliquely on either side Let us now consider when two or three Mountains or half a dozen fall into his Gulf at once they might raise the Water oblikely a great way on either side I pray you how far Shall I yield unto him a hundred miles or five hundred miles sure I yield a great way yet this would come very far short of the Northern Poles And thus many men might have escaped the Deluge and been saved from it as well as Noah with his Ark. So that this Deluge would have been but a partial Deluge over a small part of the Earth a thing which he mightily argues against in the first Book of his Theory Chap. 3. for as I shewed before the Earth must needs break in those parts next the Torrid Zone several hundred years before the Northern And thus the greater part of his habitable World would have escaped the Deluge Again I pray you consider what Moses saith of the Flood and this Man urges also upon other occasions when it seems to serve his turn as when he argues against the Creation of new Waters for that would make a sudden rise of Water against which he urges the words of Moses who saith That the Flood increased by degrees till at length it lifted up the Ark above the Earth and carried it upon the face of the Waters and so decreased by degrees but now the case is altered and the Waters must dash up and turnble down on a sudden Is this increasing by degrees forty days or forty hours when the Water could not be four minutes in dashing up and so tumbling down again And thus he doth in several places of his Theory now Pro and then Con. XVII And now comes a thing very admirable He endeavours to screw out the ground of this Romantick Rupture from those few words of Moses The Fountains of the great Deep were broke open Mark you saith he Here Moses first speaks of breaking open From whence he concludes a great breach And of what The Fountains of the great Deep And this great Deep he supposes was all included within the Earth and had no Fountain at all issuing out for he allows no Fountains in his new Earth and therefore by Fountains you must conceive Moses doth not mean such flowing Fountains as we have but the breaking or cleaving the Earth asunder when the Water with the Vapours forced its way out But all this fansie of his is quite spoiled by himself he giving us a Rule and a true one Page 82. That Moses relating unto us the Deluge as an Historiographer ought to use common words and such as may express his meaning to the people to whom he delivered this relation Surely then the people who knew no other Fountains but such as usually we have flowing with Water must needs understand the like unto them and not such Fractions and breaches of the Earth as they never heard of before nor any man ever called Fountains Then he makes another Observation That Moses useth here the word great Abyss mentioned Gen. 1. 2. and not the common word for the Sea But I shall shew him that Moses doth call the same Abyss the Sea For Gen. 1. 9. those Waters which covered the Earth ver 2. were gathered together into one place and ver 10. God called those waters Seas And so we find that the Fountains of the great Deep and the Fountains of the Sea are both one and the same in the first Chapter of Genesis and therefore we in our Earth understand them so Moses calls them Fountains of the great Deep or Fountains of the Sea and by Fountains of the Sea we understand those that run from the Sea which were broken up whether Literally or Metaphoricaly as he pleases that is broken up and enlarged that they might flow in great abundance All this proves nothing to us nor to any man that hath not his head already filled with such a vain fansie as the rupture of the whole Earth But passing over all this let us now consider whether this be the Deluge that Moses meant XVIII He saith the Flood was forty days upon the Earth and the waters increased and bare up the Ark and it was lift up above the earth Here we have an increase of the Waters forty days by the flowing of the Fountains from the great Deep and the Windows of Heaven being opened both in the same day But in his description of the Flood he puts the Rain forty days before any breach of the Earth And when the Earth brake what became of the Ark Moses saith it was born up and lift above the Earth by the Waters prevailing but in his description the Earth must first break under the Ark and so the Ark necessarily must fall along with it into the Waters which were under the Earth And this he would have to be the same with lifting up above the Earth But poor Noah with his Sons and Daughters found it otherwise and surely were mightily amazed to find themselves so much deceived in God's Promise having taken so great pains to make an Ark to save them by swimming upon the Waters yet were now tumbled headlong down Ark and all into the Abyss A rare way of lifting up Then another great part of the Earth falling into the Abyss flounced the Waters up with a mighty force even unto the Heavens and made there as it were a flying River as his own words express it in the end of the sixth Chapter And so one piece of the Earth after another falling down into the Abyss there was such a commotion and tempest raised

this particular description of Moses which is so plain as I do not know how he could speak plainer telling us how the Deluge was caused this Man hath the confidence to make a very different relation of it Job 28. God asks him a question Where wast thou when I laid the foundation of the earth Declare if thou hast understanding So I may well say to this Man Where wast thou when I brought a Deluge upon the Earth Declare if thou hast understanding Sure this Man was not then in being and therefore can discover no more unto us of that Deluge but what he received from others And I desire to know of him whether any of the Antients except the fabulous Heathens have delivered unto him any different narration from Moses concerning this Deluge the Christians sure have no other nor had the fews any other before them who are the men most likely to retain such a Tradition written or unwritten for Abraham had Sem the Son of Noah to instruct him in all things during his whole life of a hundred and seventy years Sem dying after Abraham as all conclude by a just computation Is it not then a strange thing that this Fraction of the Earth being the principal Cause given by this Man for the Deluge and without which there could be none as he affirms I say again Is it not very strange that Sem should not relate so wonderful a matter to Abraham unto whom doubtless he delivered the narration of the Flood with all its circumstances The other Sons of Noah Ham and Japhet lived also many years after the Flood and it is as strange that none of them should mention it to their Posterity and so it might have been conveyed unto Heathens also Yet no man in the World hitherto hath uttered one syllable of it And therefore I think I may safely affirm and he will be very well pleased with it if I say no Author in the World ever understood the Deluge or related it in such a manner as he hath found out and consequently may challenge to himself the glory of it if it be true but must bear the shame also if it be false But if you will have patience I will tell you in short the whole substance of this Deluge as he sets it forth XV. First he presupposes the World to have been before the Deluge of a smooth uniform surface of Earth as I shall shew hereafter without any Sea appearing but all the Sea was enclosed within a compass of Earth round about it and this Earth inhabited by all Mankind whose wickedness grew to be so great that God resolved to destroy them all except Noah and his Family who found favour with him And God foreseeing that the people of the World would grow so wicked as to deserve a destruction he so fashioned this World as at sixteen hundred years after the Creation it should in an instant fall all to pieces of it self And in this he admires God's great Wisdom but 't is his own invention setting it forth by the comparison of an Artists making a Clock with so rare an invention as not onely to strike at every hour but exactly at the end of a hundred hours it would all of it self fly asunder and break which would be far more admirable faith he than onely to make it so as to strike at each hour But now I pray you observe the rare Invention whereby this was effected This Earth at first you must suppose was a very Paradise but in process of time the Sun with its mighty heat so parched and filled it with chops and chauns which descended very far into the Earth and prepared it for a rupture and so heated the Waters within the Earth as it made them boil and send forth such violent furious vapours that the whole body of the Earty by their strugling to get forth was put into a terrible Earthquake and at length broke out in that raging manner as shattered this lower World to pieces which falling into that gulf of Water underneath great bodies of Earth tumbling down at once into it did so force the Waters up as to mount even to the very Heavens and so down again And by this means the Waters being cast up into the Air in several places one after another as the Earth tumbled down covered the Earth part after part as he supposes and thus made a Deluge for so he would fain have it Is not this a rare Romantick way and far exceeds all that ever hath been written of Sir Amadis de Gaule or the Knight of the Burning Pestle XVI Before I proceed farther I shall make some Remarks upon this his rare Invention First this whole body of the Earth like a vast great Pitcher was heating by the Sun sixteen hundred years together a wonderful thing One would have thought the Sun in six hundred years time or a thousand at most would have tried the uttermost of its strength and have set this Pitcher a boiling I pray you how thick was this Earth that it could heat the Waters under it He supposes a mile at least and yet in the hottest part of the World that we can now find do but make a Vault in the Earth twenty yards deep we shall find the Earth rather cold than hot and 't will yield a refreshment to any one that goes into it And sure our Torrid Zone is as hot as the Temperate Regions were in his fine World How then came his fine Earth to break into so many parts For we find when fumes or vapours are in the Earth and cause an Earthquake by their struggling mightily to get forth as soon as they have made a breach in one place to get out the struggling ceaseth and the Vapours come out in a Whirlwind Hurricane or some such thing And therefore had his Earth broken in some few places towards the Torrid Zone where it was most likely to break being thereabouts much more parched and chopt than in other parts methinks those vapours going forth at liberty his great Pitcher should cease from it boiling fury and the remaining body of the Earth might still have continued its dainty spherical form For certainly those parts under the Torrid Zone and nearit would have been more chopt and made ready for a breach in the first six hundred years than the Northern parts in the whole sixteen hundred especially considering the Earth as he would have it was set in that posture to the Sun and was so unfufferably hot thereabouts as no man living could endure it For so he sets it forth when he comes to treat of Paradise and dividing the World into two Hemispheres by the Torrid Zone and that men could not pass from one to the other by reason of the excessive heat Wherefore as I said it must needs be that this part must break many hundred years before the Northern part and the vapours got out the struggling and breaking of the Earth