This EBook is an essay —a Discourse, Denton calls it— about a millenary story common to several religions, among them Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
The story of the the Deluge is actually two stories in one: the story of a great flood —the Deluge— and the story ship that survived that flood: the Noah's Ark.
Denton takes the narrative as told by the Bible's Genesis, but the story is not the same in every tradition. In the Rabbinic tradition , for example,
Noah was engaged both day and night in feeding and caring for the animals, and did not sleep for the entire year aboard the Ark. The animals were the best of their species, and so behaved with utmost goodness. They abstained from procreation, so that the number of creatures that disembarked was exactly equal to the number that embarked. The raven created problems, refusing to go out of the Ark when Noah sent it forth and accusing the Patriarch of wishing to destroy its race, but as the commentators pointed out, God wished to save the raven, for its descendants were destined to feed the prophet Elijah.
As part of the critical analysis in The Deluge In The Light Of Modern Science... the author says:
An elephant eats four hundred pounds of hay in twenty-four hours. Since there are two species of elephants, the African and the Indian, there must have been four elephants in the ark; and, supposing them to live upon hay, they would require three hundred tons. There are at least seven species of the rhinoceros; and fourteen of these, at seventy five tons each, would consume no less than one thousand and fifty tons. The two thousand four hundred and seventy-eight clean beasts, —oxen, elk, giraffes, camels, deer, antelope, sheep, goats, with the horses, zebras, asses, hippopotami, rodents, and marsupials— could not have required less than four thousand five hundred tons; making a total of five thousand eight hundred and fifty tons. A ton of hay occupies about eighteen cubic yards; and the quantity of hay required would fill a hundred and five thousand three hundred cubic yards of space, or more than the entire capacity of the ark.
Since William Denton is very far away from writing as a theologician, he irreverently asks his reader:
A journey to the polar regions would be necessary to obtain the white bear, the musk-ox, of which seven would be required, since it is a clean beast; seven reindeer, likewise; the white fox, the polar hare, the lemming, and seven of each species of cormorant, gannet, penguin, petrel, and gull, some of which are as large as eagles, as well as mergansers, geese, and ducks, certain species of which are only found in the frigid zone. Noah or his agents must have discovered Greenland and North America thousands of years before Columbus was born: they must have preceded Behring, Parry, Ross, Kane, and Hayes in exploring the Arctic regions. They searched the ice-floes and numerous islands of the Arctic seas, snow-shoed, over the frozen tundras of Siberia, to be certain that no living thing escaped them; then, after catching and caging all the animals, conveyed them, with all manner of food necessary for their sustenance, together with ice to temper the heat of the climate to which they were for more than a year to be exposed, returned to the nearest port, and, after a toilsome journey from the sea-coast to Armenia, arrived at their destination. How many of these animals would survive the journey? and, of those that did, how many would survive the change of climate and habits?
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