GOSSIP THE AFFINITY OF RACES. 313 



drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the Flood came 

 and destroyed them all. Then the windows of heaven were opened, 

 the fountains of the great deep were broken up, and the rain was 

 upon the earth forty days and forty nights. This catastrophe is 

 very particularly stated to have commenced in the six hundredth 

 year of Noah's life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the 

 month. Fifteen cubits (27 feet) upwards did the waters prevail, 

 or the land subside to that extent, and the mountains were covered. 

 It is a remarkable coincidence as concerns the Atlantean hypothe- 

 sis, that Josephus determines the year at the Flood to have begun 

 about the autumnal equinox; thus the 17th day of the 2nd month 

 (Marchesvan) would fall in our October, about the time when the 

 rainy season begins in the West Indies. The historian Edwards, 

 whom I have so frequently quoted, thus describes that phenomena : 

 — * ' An European who has not visited those climates can form no 

 just conception of the quantity of water which deluges the earth at 

 this season, — by an exact account which was kept of the rain which 

 fell in one year in Barbados [1762,] it appeared to have been 

 87^ cubic inches, equal to 7 feet Sj^^ inches perpendicular. Taking 

 the whole islands throughout, from 60 to 65 inches appears to be 

 about the medium of rain in seasonable years. If this quantity 

 should annually fall in England, the country would be deluged, 

 and the fruits of the earth destroyed. The power of the sun at 

 that distance from the equator would be too feeble to exhale a suffi- 

 cient quantity of it. Earthquakes also are not unfrequent ; but 

 none have been productive of mischief since the fatal one of June 

 1692, which swallowed up Port Royal." To Avhich I may add, 

 that perhaps the judgment on Port Poyal for its wickedness was as 

 just as that which destroyed the posterity of Adam many thousand 

 years previously, and obliterated the continent which they had 

 inhabited for so long a period. 



The immediate result of this great cataclysm was the transpor 

 of Noah and his sons to a region whose climate and productions 

 differed considerably from those of the country of endless summer 

 from whence they were tempest-driven. The conditions expressed 

 recognize a temperate clime, such as may well have existed in the 

 central parts of Asia. The olive grew there, for the dove returned 



