266 HASISADRA'S ADVENTURE \u 



as King Charles's head in a famous memorial 

 with about as much appropriateness The old 

 story of the raised beach on Moel Tryfaen is 

 trotted out ; though, even if the facts are as yet 

 rightly interpreted, there is not a shadow of 

 evidence that the change of sea-level in that 

 locality was sudden, or that glacial Welshmen 

 would have known it was taking place. 1 Surely 

 it is difficult to perceive the relevancy of bringing 

 in something that happened in the glacial epoch 

 (if it did happen) to account for the tradition of a 

 flood in the Euphrates valley between 2000 arid 

 3000 B.C. But the date of the Noachian flood is 

 solidly fixed by the sole authority for it ; no 

 shuffling of the chronological data will carry it so 

 far back as 3000 B.C. ; and the Hebrew epos 

 agrees with the Chaldsean in placing it after the 

 development of a somewhat advanced civilisation. 

 The only authority for the Noachian deluge 

 assures us that, before it visited the earth, Cain 

 had built cities ; Jubal had invented harps and 

 organs ; while mankind had advanced so far 

 beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage 

 that Tubal-cain was a worker in iron. Therefore, 

 if the Noachian legend is to be taken for the 

 history of an event which happened in the glacial 

 epoch, we must revise our notions of pleistocene 



1 The well-known difficulties connected with this case have 

 recently been carefully discussed by Mr. Bell in the Transactions 

 of the Geological Society of Glasgow. 



