28 The Rev. John Ken rick on the alleged 



eluded the idea of accidental coincidence, manifesting itself 

 at a time when there could be no communication with a fo- 

 reign source. We have not found either of these conditions 

 fulfilled in our inquiry into the traditions of Deucalion. 



The next hypothesis which suggests itself is that they are 

 the real reminiscences of some local flood, such as a country 

 abounding with lakes and mountains, bordered by the sea, 

 and exposed to earthquakes, must often have undergone. It 

 is certain that the Greeks had no tradition of a general de- 

 luge. Apollodorus, whose description of the flood of Deuca- 

 lion bears some resemblance to Noah's flood, says, ra ixro$ 

 'Jcrfl/xoO xai ris\o7rovvY)<rov (tvvb^uQyi Tra'vra, on which Heyne ob- 

 serves, " in Peloponneso diluvii memoria nulla," which is sub- 

 stantially true, although Dionysius of Halicarnassus (i. 61.) 

 mentions that some of the Pelasgians left Arcadia for Samo- 

 thrace in consequence of a flood which deprived them of part 

 of their land. This is also true of Attica, though Pau- 

 sanias speaks of a chasm (i. 18. 43.) in the temple of Jupi- 

 ter, through which the water of Deucalion's flood (sTro^piu) 

 had run off. This may seem a presumption in favour of 

 a real tradition of an inundation produced by an earth- 

 quake, or some similar cause. Yet even in this modified 

 form, the opinion of a real tradition appears to be open to 

 many of the objections urged against the former hypothesis. 

 If chronology is to be applied to these matters at all, Deuca- 

 lion's flood cannot be placed later than the 15th century be- 

 fore Christ : we find the first mention of it in the 5th. We 

 must not judge of the probability of such a transmission by 

 the fact of traditions having reached our own times from those 

 of the Roman empire: the use of writing has never been lost 

 in Europe. Besides, all the circumstances of the story are 

 evidently fictitious. No inundation could have floated or 

 driven Deucalion to the top of Parnassus without deluging 

 all the low lands of Greece ; and it will then require to be 

 accounted for, how this event has left no tradition in the other 

 parts which must have suffered from it. If we take away 

 from the story Deucalion and Pyrrha, the ark, the resting on 

 Mount Parnassus, the reproduction of the human race by the 

 casting of stones, what remains to be the matter of a tradition? 

 The simple fact of an inundation, — a natural phenomenon 

 which the imagination can multiply and magnify as much as 

 it pleases, and place in any age it thinks fit. The only rea- 

 son for admitting such an extraordinary transmission of a fact, 

 through ages which have preserved no memorials of their own 

 history, would be the impossibility of conceiving how such 

 a thing should have been invented, if not true. But unless 



