as Palestine, where for the great part of the year water is scarce and
precious, that we are forced to deduce borrowing; and there is no doubt
that both the Babylonian and the biblical stories have been responsible
for some at any rate of the scattered tales. But there is no need
to adopt the theory of a single source for all of them, whether in
Babylonia or, still less, in Egypt.(1)

(1) This argument is taken from an article I published in
Professor Headlam's _Church Quarterly Review_, Jan., 1916,
pp. 280 ff., containing an account of Dr. Poebel's
discovery.

I should like to add, with regard to this reading of our new evidence,
that I am very glad to know Sir James Frazer holds a very similar
opinion. For, as you are doubtless all aware, Sir James is at present
collecting Flood stories from all over the world, and is supplementing
from a wider range the collections already made by Lenormant, Andree,
Winternitz, and Gerland. When his work is complete it will be possible
to conjecture with far greater confidence how particular traditions or
groups of tradition arose, and to what extent transmission has taken
place. Meanwhile, in his recent Huxley Memorial Lecture,(1) he has
suggested a third possibility as to the way Deluge stories may have
arisen.

(1) Sir J. G. Frazer, _Ancient Stories of a Great Flood_
(the Huxley Memorial Lecture, 1916), Roy. Anthrop. Inst.,
1916.

Stated briefly, it is that a Deluge story may arise as a popular
explanation of some striking natural feature in a country, although to
the scientific eye the feature in question is due to causes other than
catastrophic flood. And he worked out the suggestion in the case of
the Greek traditions of a great deluge, associated with the names of
Deucalion and Dardanus. Deucalion's deluge, in its later forms at
any rate, is obviously coloured by Semitic tradition; but both Greek
stories, in their origin, Sir James Frazer would trace to local
conditions--the one suggested by the Gorge of Tempe in Thessaly, the
other explaining the existence of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles. As
he pointed out, they would be instances, not of genuine historical
traditions, but of what Sir James Tyler calls "observation myths".
A third story of a great flood, regarded in Greek tradition as the
earliest of the three, he would explain by an extraordinary inundation
of the Copaic Lake in Boeotia, which to this day is liable to great
fluctuati