shattered into a thousand pieces;
and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken
fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various
degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. _Picture_, too,
scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the
wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of
old classical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient
hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan,
and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico.
The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its
various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each
other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading
idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of the Greek. On what is
known to antiquaries as the Apamaean medal, struck during the reign of
Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of _Noe_ inscribed on a
floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and
to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And
in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman
who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a
leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic
female,--Matalcueje, the goddess of water,--is seen pouring down her
floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative
apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the
forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They
bear the same sort of _artistic_ relation to each other that the rude
Tamanac tradition bears, in a _literary_ point of view, to the well
constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged
apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event.

[Illustration: Fig. 110.

OLD MEXICAN PICTURE.

(_Humboldt._)]

The tradition of the Flood may, I repeat, be properly regarded as
universal; seeing there is scarce any considerable race of man among
which, in some of its many forms, it is not to be found. Now, it has
been argued by some of the older theologians, with a not very cogent
logic, that the universality of the tradition establishes the
universality of the Flood,--that where the tradition _is to be found_,
the Flood _must have been_;--an argument which would have force if it