58 THE NOACHIAN FLOOD. 



in others, of eating their dead bodies 1 . Such customs 

 we have on record four centuries before Christ, such 

 customs on record as existing nineteen centuries after. 

 Will any one attempt to persuade us that the savages of 

 Andaman and the Feejee Islands are cousins, through an 

 ancestor no more remote than Noah, of Chatham and 

 Wilberforce, and Lesseps and Brunei ? 



Traditions of a Deluge, it is true, are found almost 

 everywhere. The reason doubtless is that almost every- 

 where some tremendous calamity of this description has 

 at one time or another occurred. Inundations on a small 

 scale are common and frequent, but on a scale great 

 enough to surprise the imagination and become tradi- 

 tional in the memories of a people, they would naturally 

 be rare and infrequent in the extreme, so that the fact of 

 such an experience belonging to the history of so many 

 different races, is but another proof, or at least another 

 indication, of the antiquity of man. If stress is to be 

 laid on the points of similarity between the traditions, 

 as proving that every land has been ravaged by the 

 waters of a flood, equal stress may in fairness be laid on 

 the points of difference, as proving that not one common 

 universal Deluge is spoken of, but many separate and 

 partial floods, distinct in time, in place, and in results. 

 If stress again is to be laid on the tradition because it 

 is common to so many tribes, let equal importance be 

 granted to the traditions of time among the Chaldeans 

 and the Egyptians, the Chinese and the Hindus, who 



1 Sir John Lubbock, 'Prehistoric Times,' pp. 338, 346, 452 ; Hero- 

 dotus, iv. 26. 



