ea; and it was a curious fact,
that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,--the very
day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition
of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed
through a multiplying glass, appears to have been increased from one to
many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato
makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and
numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and
several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted
in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the
mythologic ages,--the last of them to which any determining
circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole
fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,--it
appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should
be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than
that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in
the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood
has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic
history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repetitions of the
original tradition _should_ have taken place. The traditions of the same
event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come
in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their
adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes
of the Orinoco do so; and should these tribes come to be fused
ultimately into one nation, nothing seems more probable than that their
varying editions, instead of being also fused together, should remain
distinct, as the recollections of separate and independent catastrophes.
And thus the several deluges of Grecian mythology may in reality
testify, not to the occurrence of several floods, but to the existence
merely of several independent tribes, among whom the one great tradition
has been so altered and modified ere they came to possess a common
literature, that when at length they became skilful enough to place it
on record, it appeared to them not as one, but as many. The admirable
reflection of Humboldt suggested by the South American traditions seems,
incidentally at least, to bear out this view. "Those ancient traditions
of the human race," he says, "which we find dispersed over