the whole
surface of the globe, like the relics of a vast shipwreck, are highly
interesting in the philosophical study of our own species. How many
different tongues belonging to branches that appear totally distinct
transmit to us the same facts! The traditions concerning races that have
been destroyed, and the renewal of nature, scarcely vary in reality,
though every nation gives them a local coloring. In the great
continents, as in the smallest islands of the Pacific Ocean, it is
always on the loftiest and nearest mountain that the remains of the
human race have been saved; and this event appears the more recent in
proportion as the nations are uncultivated, and as the knowledge they
have of their own existence has no very remote date." And it seems at
least not improbable, that the several traditions of apparently special
deluges,--deluges each with its own set of circumstances, and from which
the progenitors of one nation were saved on a hill-top, those of another
on a raft, and those of yet another in an ark or canoe, and which in one
instance destroyed only giants, and had in another the loss which they
occasioned repaired by date-stones, and in yet another by stones of the
earth,--should come to be regarded among a people composed of various
tribes, and but little accustomed to sift the evidence on which they
founded, rather as all diverse narratives of diverse events, than as in
reality but varied accounts of one and the same tremendous catastrophe.

Taking it for granted, then, that the several Greek traditions refer to
but one great event, let us accept that which records what is known as
the flood of Deucalion, as more adequately representative of the general
type of its class, especially in the edition given by Lucian (in his
work "De Dea Syria"), than any of the others. "The present world," says
this writer, "is peopled from the sons of Deucalion. In respect to the
former brood, they were men of violence, and lawless in their dealings;
they regarded not oaths, nor observed the rites of hospitality, nor
showed mercy to those who sued for it. On this account they were doomed
to destruction; and for this purpose there was a mighty eruption of
water from the earth, attended with heavy showers from above, so that
the rivers swelled and the sea overflowed, till the whole earth was
covered with a flood, and all flesh drowned. Deucalion alone was
preserved, to people the world. This mercy was shown him on account