244 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



that it may continue to be the. rule; the present feud between science 

 and religion will probably be healed. In a couple of thousand years 

 the world may be told about our period as one when people thought 

 the Keibular hypothesis w^as an article of faith and radiation the prin- 

 ciple which vitalized the universe; Darwin and Spencer may be con- 

 sidered the founders of our belief, which may then perhaps have lived 

 its time and died. 



I see no reason to question the general accuracy of what may be 

 called the ethnological part of the Noachian myth.^ The sons of 

 Japhet or the Indo-European races, usually called Aryan, very likely 

 did spread east and west from the hill country where the Tigris and 

 the Euphrates rise, expelling the older Turanian races from the valleys 

 01 those rivers. In no other way is the similarity of the root words 

 of Sanscrit with its Indian derivatives or congeners to Grreek, Latin and 

 G-ermian so easily explainable. Ncr is the speech of the Keltic and 

 Slavonic peoples altogether alien, while some venture to say that une 

 African Berbers are of Ar^^an origin, pre-KeMic, and connected with the 

 Iberian race, once occupying the Appenine as well as the Pyrensean 

 valleys, but now surviving only as the Basques. But of the time or 

 times of the great Aryan movement we know nothing. We have some 

 seven thousand well authenticated years of Egyptian history ; we already 

 know there was a scarcely less remote high Assyrian civilization, but 

 Buch periods, long though they be, are as nothing to the time required 

 for a tribal, much less for a national belief to grow into even such 

 shapes as we see dying out among our own aborigines of the neolithic 

 epoch. For primitive views and customs to have developed into such 

 finished forms as Pythagoras found in Egypt, India and Persia must 

 have occupied seons. We are compelled at least to adopt the Egyptian 

 view as indicated by Plato, where he narrates that the priest told Solon 

 the Greeks were but children, for Egypt had a history of twenty-five 

 thousand years, and we must largely extend the two thousand between 

 Noah and Christ, deduced from the Mosaic chronology, howeveor 

 strongly insisted o^n as an article, forsooth, of faith, by St. Augustine 

 and others, the succession being not yet quite extinct. The Aryan 

 myths, distinct from Egyptian or Semitic, in the most ancient form 

 available, are embodied in the Eig-Veda of India; and in reading the 

 translations which have during the last century made it accessible to 



* This opinion by no means relates to the Ark method of avoiding an 

 Imaginary deluge. Pythagoras possibly had the opportunity of comparing 

 this part of the Hebrew myth with that of the Zoroastrians, who supposed, 

 instead of a ship, a cave made in a mountain side, which was artificially 

 lighted, and served as a refuge from deluge and from snow for several years. 

 See the Zend Avesta, any translation; James Darmstetter's preferred. 



