as a part of the traditional
history of the antediluvian nations which had taken for its share the
new humanity. He thought that the mythology of the Greeks was borrowed
both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of India,
adapted after their own fashion by the beauty-loving Hellenes.

"It is impossible," said he, "to doubt the priority of the Asiatic
Scriptures; they are earlier than our sacred books. The man who is
candid enough to admit this historical fact sees the whole world expand
before him. Was it not on the Asiatic highland that the few men
took refuge who were able to escape the catastrophe that ruined our
globe--if, indeed men had existed before that cataclysm or shock? A
serious query, the answer to which lies at the bottom of the sea. The
anthropogony of the Bible is merely a genealogy of a swarm escaping from
the human hive which settled on the mountainous slopes of Thibet between
the summits of the Himalaya and the Caucasus.

"The character of the primitive ideas of that horde called by its
lawgiver the people of God, no doubt to secure its unity, and perhaps
also to induce it to maintain his laws and his system of government
--for the Books of Moses are a religious, political, and civil code
--that character bears the authority of terror; convulsions of nature
are interpreted with stupendous power as a vengeance from on high. In
fact, since this wandering tribe knew none of the ease enjoyed by a
community settled in a patriarchal home, their sorrows as pilgrims
inspired them with none but gloomy poems, majestic but blood-stained. In
the Hindoos, on the contrary, the spectacle of the rapid recoveries of
the natural world, and the prodigious effects of sunshine, which they
were the first to recognize, gave rise to happy images of blissful
love, to the worship of Fire and of the endless personifications of
reproductive force. These fine fancies are lacking in the Book of the
Hebrews. A constant need of self-preservation amid all the dangers and
the lands they traversed to reach the Promised Land engendered their
exclusive race-feeling and their hatred of all other nations.

"These three Scriptures are the archives of an engulfed world. Therein
lies the secret of the extraordinary splendor of those languages and
their myths. A grand human history lies beneath those names of men and
places, and those fables which charm us so irresistibly, we know not
why. Perhaps it is because we find in the