e petrified
remains of corals or of fishes, might not have originated among the
aborigines some mere myth of a great inundation sufficient to account
for the appearances in the rocks. But he found that the region was
mainly a primary one, in which he could detect only a single patch of
sedimentary rock, existing as an unfossiliferous sandstone. And so,
though little prejudiced in favor of the Mosaic record, he could not
avoid arriving at the conclusion, simply in his character as a
philosophic inquirer, who had no other object than to attain to the real
and the true, that the legend of the wild Maypures and Tamanacs
regarding a great destructive deluge was simply one of the many forms of
that oldest of traditions which appears to be well nigh coextensive with
the human family, and which, in all its varied editions, seems to point
at one and the same signal event. Very varied some of these editions
are. The inhabitants of Tahiti tell, for instance, that the Supreme God,
a long time ago, being angry, dragged the earth through the sea, but
that by a happy accident _their_ island broke off and was preserved; the
Indians of Terra Firma believe, that when the great deluge took place,
one man, with his wife and children, escaped in a canoe; and the Indians
of the North American lakes hold, that the father of all their tribes
being warned in a dream that a flood was coming, built a raft, on which
he preserved his family, and pairs of all the animals, and which drifted
about for many months, until at length a new earth was made for their
reception by the "Mighty Man above."

In that widely extended portion of the Old World over which Christianity
has spread in its three great types,--Greek, Romish, and
Protestant,--and in the scarce less extended portion occupied by the
followers of Mohammed, the Scriptural account of the deluge, or the
imperfect reflection of it borrowed by the Koran, has, of course,
supplanted the old traditions. But outside these regions we find the
traditions existing still. One of the sacred books of the Parsees
(representatives of the ancient Persians) records, that "the world
having been corrupted by Ahriman the Evil One, it was thought necessary
to bring over it a universal flood of waters, that all impurity might be
washed away. Accordingly the rain came down in drops as large as the
head of a bull, until the earth was wholly covered with water, and all
the creatures of the Evil One perished. And then t