s and
relations, and to convey on board everything necessary to sustain life,
together with all the different animals, both birds and quadrupeds, and
trust himself fearlessly to the deep. Having asked the deity whither he
was to sail, he was answered: "To the gods"; upon which he offered up
a prayer for the good of mankind. He then obeyed the divine admonition,
and built a vessel five stadia in length and two in breadth. Into this
he put everything which he had prepared, and last of all conveyed into
it his wife, his children, and his friends.

"After the flood had been upon the earth, and was in time abated,
Xisuthrus sent out birds from the vessel, which not finding any food,
nor any place whereupon they might rest their feet, returned to him
again. After an interval of some days, he sent them forth a second time;
and they now returned with their feet tinged with mud. He made a trial
a third time with these birds; but they returned to him no more: from
which he judged that the surface of the earth had appeared above the
waters. He therefore made an opening in the vessel, end upon looking out
found that it was stranded upon the side of some mountain, upon which
he immediately quitted it with his wife, his daughter, and the pilot.
Xisuthrus then paid his adoration to the earth: and, having constructed
an altar, offered sacrifices to the gods, and, with those who had come
out of the vessel with him, disappeared. Him they saw no more, but they
could distinguish his voice in the air, and could hear him admonish them
to pay due regard to the gods. He informed them that it was on account
of his piety that he had been taken away to live with the gods, and that
his wife and daughter had obtained the same honor."

It is more than likely that this story, which as we have seen has
extended to the remotest corners of the earth, has an esoteric
meaning, and that it embodies the doctrines of the ancients relative to
re-incarnation and the renewal of worlds. Doubtless it portrays not only
the end of a cycle, but that by it is prefigured the fortunes of a human
soul, which in its ascent, is from time to time forced into a human
body.

All the early Kosmogonies are intermingled with the history of a great
flood, from the ravages of which an ark which contained a man was saved.
The Gothic story of creation indicates that the Scythians belonged to
the same race as the Chaldeans. At the beginning of time when nothing
had been formed, a