CHAPTER V 

 NOAH'S MESSENGERS 



OUR first thought when we hear the word "deluge" 

 is of Noah and his Ark, and the funny toy of our 

 childhood rises to the mind's eye. In that child- 

 hood we had no doubt that the flood described in the 

 first book of the Old Testament covered the whole globe. 

 Now we know that the story is a Semitic tradition, per- 

 haps nothing more than a sun-myth in origin, although 

 the actual occurrence of some extraordinary inundation 

 may have got mixed with it and localized it. In fact, the 

 belief in an all-submerging deluge, or, in what is its 

 equivalent — namely, a time when the world was a plain 

 of water with no land above its quiet surface — is a part 

 of the mythology or theology, or both, of many diverse 

 peoples in both hemispheres ; and almost always birds are 

 prominently associated with its incidents and the ensuing 

 separation of land from water. 



A surprising number of persons of ordinary intelli- 

 gence even now, and in this enlightened country, continue 

 to regard beds of water- worn gravels, and the fossil 

 shells, etc., seen in the rocks, as relics of the Noachian 

 deluge, and "diluvian" and "antediluvian" are terms that 

 hardly yet have disappeared from popular geology. 



The earliest available accounts of such a deluge as the 

 Noachian are engraved on clay tablets recovered from 

 the ruins of Babylonia, and written 2000 or more years 

 before the beginning of the Christian era. Several narra- 



