78 PHYSIOGNOMY OF PLANTS. 



( 8 ) p. 11. " Traditions of Samothrace." 



Diodorus has preserved to us this remarkable tradition, 

 the probability of which renders it in the eyes of the 

 geologist almost equivalent to a historical certainty. The 

 Island of Samothrace, formerly called also .^Ethiopea, Dar- 

 dania, Leucania or Leucosia in the Scholiast to Apollonius 

 Rhodius, and which was a seat of the ancient mysteries of 

 the Cabin, was inhabited by the remains of an ancient nation, 

 several words of whose language were preserved to a later 

 period in the ceremonies accompanying sacrifices. The situa- 

 tion of this island, opposite to the Thracian Hebrus and near 

 the Dardanelles, renders it not surprising that a more 

 detailed tradition of the catastrophe of the breaking forth 

 of the waters of the Euxine should have been preserved 

 there. Rites were performed at altars supposed to mark 

 the limits of the irruption of the waves; and in Samo- 

 thrace as well as in Boeotia, a belief in the periodically 

 recurring destruction of mankind, (a belief which was also 

 found among the Mexicans in the form of a myth of four 

 destructions of the world), was connected with historical 

 recollections of particular inundations. (Otfr. Muller 

 Geschichten Hellenischer Stamme und Stadte, Bd. i. S. 65 

 and 119.) According to Diodorus, the Samothracians re- 

 lated that the Black Sea had once been an inland lake, but 

 that, being swollen by the rivers which flow into it, it had 

 broken through, first the strait of the Bosphorus, and 

 afterwards that of the Hellespont ; and this long before the 

 inundations spoken of by other nations. (Diod. Sicul. lib. 

 v. cap. 47, p. 369, Wesseling.) These ancient revolutions 



