* >-'* ' 



THEORY OF THE EARTH. 145 



As to Deucalion, whether this prince be re- 

 garded as a real or fictitious personage, however 

 little we enter into the manner in which his de- 

 luge has been introduced into the poems of the 

 Greeks, and the various details with which it be - 

 comes successively enriched, we perceive that it 

 was nothing else than a tradition of the great ca- 

 taclysm, altered and placed by the Hellenians in 

 the period which they also assigned to Deuca- 

 lion, because he was regarded as the founder of 

 their nation, and because his history is confound- 

 ed with that of all the chiefs of the renewed na- 

 tions*. 



mentioned by Censorinus, De Die Natali, cap. xxi. In 

 reality, Censorinus wrote only 238 years after Christ ; and, 

 it appears, from Julius Africanus, ap. Euseb. Praep. cv. that 

 Acusilaus, the first author who placed a del age in the reign 

 of Ogyges, made this prince cotemporary with Phoronaeus, 

 which would have brought him very near the first Olym- 

 piad. Julius Africanus makes only an interval of 1020 

 years between the two epochs ; and there is even a passage 

 in Censorinus conformable to this opinion. Some also read 

 erogilium in place of ogygium, in the passage of Varro, which 

 we have quoted above from Censorinus. But what would 

 this be but an Erogitian Cataclysm, of which nobody has 

 ever heard ? 



* Neither Homer nor Hesiod knew any thing of the de- 

 luge of Deucalion, any more than that of Ogyges, The first 

 author, whose works are extant, by whom mention is made of 

 the former, is Pindar (Od, Olymp. ix.) He speaks of Deuca- 



K 



