HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION, 317 



" Concerning tlie long life of men before tlie floods and tlie 

 greater size of their bodies." He makes these remarks, he 

 says, in case any infidel should raise a doubt about men having 

 lived to so great an age. " So some indeed do not believe that 

 men's bodies were formerly much greater than now." Virgil, 

 he continues, expresses the huge size of the men of former 

 times, how much more then in the younger periods of the 

 world, before the celebrated deluge. " But concerning the 

 magnitude of their bodies, the graves laid bare by age or the 

 force of rivers and various accidents especially convict the in- 

 credulous, where they have come to light, or where bones of 

 the dead of incredible magnitude have fallen. I have seen, 

 and not I alone, on the shore by Utica, so huge a molar tooth 

 of a man, that were it cut up into small models of teeth like 

 ours, it would seem enough to make a hundred of them. But 

 this I should think had belonge to some giant; for beside 

 that the bodies of all men were then much larger than ours, 

 the giants again far exceeded the rest."^ 



Among the traditions preserved from remote ages by the 

 human race, there are perhaps none more important to the 

 ethnologist than those which relate, in every great district of 

 the world, and with so much unity combined with so much 

 variety, the occurrence of a great Deluge in long past time. 

 In studying these Diluvial Traditions it is of the highest con- 

 sequence that he should be able to separate the results of the 

 memory of real events from those of observation of natural 

 phenomena and of purely mythological development. Hum- 

 boldt in part states the problem in his remarks on the four 

 devastations of the earth, by famine, fire, hurricane, and de- 

 luge, as represented in the Mexican picture-writing. " What- 

 ever may be their true origin, it does not appear less certain 

 that they are fictions of astronomical mythology, modified 

 either by a dim remembrance of some great revolution which 

 our planet has undergone, or in accordance with the physical 

 and geological hypotheses to which the appearance of marine 

 petrifactions and fossil bones give rise, even among peoples at 

 the greatest distance from civilization."- 



1 Aug., ' De Civitate Dei,' xv. 9. - Humboldt, Vues des Cord., pi. 26. 



