By the middle of the seventeenth century, the abundance and diversity of life discovered in the New World was calling into question the previously unchallenged belief that all life on earth originated from a single point of dispersal - Mount Ararat, after the Flood. One of the uncertainties which Kircher addressed in Arca Noë was how animals had managed to colonise lands so distant across the seas. Another, to which he devoted particular attention, was how so many creatures could have fitted into the Ark at all.: