156 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



differences must belong to all great submergences, 

 which may in one place produce great disturbance 

 and very coarse deposits, in another may be quiet 

 and deposit the finest silt. Even the flood of a river 

 or the action of a tide admits of variations of this 

 kind. In narrow channels the great tides of the 

 Bay of Fundy rush as torrents ; in wide bays they 

 creep in imperceptibly. 



The traditions and Biblical history of the Deluge 

 not only furnish important material for connecting 

 the geological ages with the period of human history, 

 and for enabling us to realise the fact that early man 

 was a witness of some of the later physical and vital 

 vicissitudes that have passed over the earth, but may 

 be correlated with other ancient traditions which 

 seem at first sight to have no immediate relation 

 to it. 



As an example, I may refer to the well-known 

 Egyptian fable of Atlantis, which may be a remi- 

 niscence of early man in the second continental 

 period, and which we may, perhaps, even connect 

 with the Mexican tradition of civilisation reaching 

 America from the East 1 



Plato has handed down to us a circumstantial 

 tradition, derived from Egypt, of a great Atlantic 

 continent west of Europe, once thickly peopled, and 

 the seat of an empire that was dominant over the 

 Mediterranean regions. This continent, or island, 



1 It is, perhaps, only an accident that Atl is the Mexican word 

 for water. 



