 and the going off, but he made use of natural causes in both, that is, of the things he had in the beginning created. The natural causes he is the author of were at hand, and with them he could do the work. The sun evaporated; the winds dried; and the waters no longer forced upwards from the abyss, subsided into the many swallows or swallow-holes, that are still to be seen in many places, on mountains and in vallies; those on the mountains being necessary to absorb that vast column of waters which rose 15 cubits above the highest hills.

A swallow is such another opening in the ground as Eldine Hole in Derbyshire(16) , and

in travelling from the Peak to the northern extremity of Northumberland, I have seen many such holes in the earth, both on the hills and in the vales. I have likewise met with them in other countries. By these swallows, a vast quantity of the waters to be sure went down to the great receptacle; all that was not exhaled, or licked up by the winds; or, except what might be left to encrease the former seas of the antediluvian world into those vast oceans which now encompasses the globe, and partly to form those vast lakes that are in several parts of the World. These things easily account for the removal of that vast mass of waters which covered the earth, and was in a mighty column above the highest hills. Every difficulty disappears before evaporation, the drying winds, the swallows, and perhaps, the turning seas into oceans: but the three first things now

named were sufficient, and the gentlemen who have reasoned so ingeniously against one another about the removal of the waters, might have saved themselves a deal of trouble, if they had reduced the operation to three simple things, under the direction of the First Cause. The swallows especially must do great work in the case, if we take into their number not only very many open gulphs or chasms, the depth of which no line or sound can reach; but likewise the communications of very many parts of the sea, and of many great unfathomable lochs, with the abyss. These absorbers could easily receive what had before come out of them. The sun by evaporation, with the wind, might take away what was raised. There is nothing hard then in conceiving how the waters of the deluge were brought away.
But as to the lake I have mentioned, into which a rapid flood poured from the bowels of the mountain, what became of this water the reader may inquire? To be sure,
