mong them as King
Charles's head in a famous memorial--with about as much appropriateness.
The old story of the raised beach on Moel Tryfaen is trotted out;
though, even if the facts are as yet rightly interpreted, there is not
a shadow of evidence that the change of sea-level in that locality was
sudden, or that glacial Welshmen would have known it was taking place.
[10] Surely it is difficult to perceive the relevancy of bringing in
something that happened in the glacial epoch (if it did happen) to
account for the tradition of a flood in the Euphrates valley between
2000 and 3000 B.C. But the date of the Noachian flood is solidly fixed
by the sole authority for it; no shuffling of the chronological data
will carry it so far back as 3000 B.C.; and the Hebrew epos agrees with
the Chaldaean in placing it after the development of a somewhat advanced
civilisation. The only authority for the Noachian deluge assures us
that, before it visited the earth, Cain had built cities; Jubal had
invented harps and organs; while mankind had advanced so far beyond the
neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that Tubal-cain was a worker in
iron. Therefore, if the Noachian legend is to be taken for the history
of an event which happened in the glacial epoch, we must revise
our notions of pleistocene civilisation. On the other hand, if the
Pentateuchal story only means something quite different, that happened
somewhere else, thousands of years earlier, dressed up, what becomes of
its credit as history? I wonder what would be said to a modern historian
who asserted that Pekin was burnt down in 1886, and then tried to
justify the assertion by adducing evidence of the Great Fire of London
in 1666. Yet the attempt to save the credit of the Noachian story by
reference to something which is supposed to have happened in the far
north, in the glacial epoch, is far more preposterous.

Moreover, these dust-raising dialecticians ignore some of the most
important and well-known facts which bear upon the question. Anything
more than a parochial acquaintance with physical geography and geology
would suffice to remind its possessor that the Holy Land itself offers a
standing protest against bringing such a deluge as that of Noah anywhere
near it, either in historical times or in the course of that pleistocene
period, of which the "great ice age" formed a part.

Judaea and Galilee, Moab and Gilead, occupy part of that extensive
tableland at the summit of t