at flood upon the earth, by which mankind would
be destroyed, he enjoined him to build a vessel, and to bring into it
his friends and relatives, with everything necessary to sustain life,
and all the various animals, birds, and quadrupeds. In obedience to the
command, the king built a vessel about three quarters of a mile in
length and half a mile in breadth, which he loaded with stores and the
different kinds of animals; and into which, on the day of the flood, he
himself entered, accompanied by his wife and children, and all his
friends. The flood broke out. After, however, accomplishing its work of
destruction, it abated; and the king sent out birds from the vessel,
which, at first finding no food or place of rest, returned to him; but
which, when, after the lapse of some days, he sent them forth again,
came back to him with their feet tinged with mud. On a third trial they
returned no more; upon which, judging that the surface of the earth was
laid dry, he made an opening in the vessel, and, looking forth, found it
stranded on a mountain of the land of Armenia.

There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition
referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In
his "Timaeus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as
discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote
antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those
great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed
the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their
records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically
remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that
"the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are
two,--deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be
noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved
are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account
of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the
deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to
be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah
of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay
(Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been
Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark,
which, being closed, he was forced to s