THEORY OF THE EARTH. 14? 



them with a particular deluge of its own, because 

 some remembrance of the general deluge common 



Prometheus, the fabricator of man ; he forms anew the hu- 

 man race of stones ; and yet Atlas, his uncle, Phoroneus, 

 who lived before him, and several other personages ante- 

 rior to him, preserve a lengthened posterity. 



In proportion as we advance toward authors who ap- 

 proach nearer our own times, we find circumstances of de- 

 tail added, which more resemble those related by Moses. 

 Thus Apollodorus gives Deucalion a great chest as a means of 

 safety ; Plutarch speaks of the pigeons by which he sought 

 to find out whether the waters had retired ; and Lucian, of 

 the animals of every kind which he had taken with him, &c. 



With regard to the blending of traditions and hypothe- 

 ses, by which it has recently been tried to infer the con- 

 clusion, that the rupture of the Thracian Bosphorus was 

 the cause of Deucalion's deluge, and even of the opening of 

 the pillars of Hercules, by making the waters of the 

 Euxine Sea discharge themselves into the Archipelago, 

 supposing them to have been much higher and more ex- 

 tended than they have been since that event, it is not neces- 

 sary for us to treat of it in detail, since it has been deter- 

 mined by the observations of M. Olivier, that if the Black 

 Sea had been as high as it is imagined to have been, it 

 would have found several passages for its waters, by hills 

 and plains less elevated than the present banks of the Bos- 

 phorus ; and by those of the Count Andreossy, that had it 

 one day fallen suddenly in the manner of a cascade by this 

 new passage, the small quantity of water that could have 

 flowed at once through so narrow an aperture, would not 

 only be diffused over the immense extent of the Mediterra- 

 nean, without occasioning a tide of a few fathoms, but that 

 2 K2 



