ly awaken in his audience the
tragic pity and terror? What possible ground is there for insisting that
he must have had some individual good in view, and that his history is
historical, in the sense that the account of the effects of a hurricane
in the Bay of Bengal, in the year 1875, is historical?

More than three centuries after the time of Assurbanipal, Berosus of
Babylon, born in the reign of Alexander the Great, wrote an account of
the history of his country in Greek. The work of Berosus has vanished;
but extracts from it--how far faithful is uncertain--have been preserved
by later writers. Among these occurs the well-known story of the Deluge
of Xisuthros, which is evidently built upon the same foundation as that
of Hasisadra. The incidents of the divine warning, the building of the
ship, the sending out of birds, the ascension of the hero, betray their
common origin. But stories, like Madeira, acquire a heightened flavour
with time and travel; and the version of Berosus is characterised by
those circumstantial improbabilities which habitually gather round the
legend of a legend. The later narrator knows the exact day of the month
on which the flood began. The dimensions of the ship are stated with
Munchausenian precision at five stadia by two--say, half by one-fifth of
an English mile. The ship runs aground among the "Gordaean mountains" to
the south of Lake Van, in Armenia, beyond the limits of any imaginable
real inundation of the Euphrates valley; and, by way of climax, we have
the assertion, worthy of the sailor who said that he had brought up one
of Pharaoh's chariot wheels on the fluke of his anchor in the Red Sea,
that pilgrims visited the locality and made amulets of the bitumen which
they scraped off from the still extant remains of the mighty ship of
Xisuthros.

Suppose that some later polyhistor, as devoid of critical faculty as
most of his tribe, had found the version of Berosus, as well as another
much nearer the original story; that, having too much respect for his
authorities to make up a _tertium quid_ of his own, out of the materials
offered, he followed a practice, common enough among ancient and,
particularly, among Semitic historians, of dividing, both into fragments
and piecing these together, without troubling himself very much about
those resulting repetitions and inconsistencies; the product of such
a primitive editorial operation would be a narrative analogous to that
which treats of