318 HISTORICAL TRADITIONS AND MYTHS OF OBSERVATION. 



That the observation of shells and corals in places above the 

 level of the sea^ and even on high mountains, should have given 

 rise to legends of great floods which deposited them there, is 

 natural enough, and quite consistent with the growth of myths 

 of monsters and giants from the observation of fossil bones. 

 Marine productions being found at heights of many hundred 

 feet above the sea, the question would evidently occur to the 

 men who speculated so ingeniously about the fossil bones, how 

 did these prodiictions of the sea get upon the mountains ? As 

 to fossil crustaceans, the Arabian geographer Abu-Zeyd ex- 

 plains their appeai^ance in Ceylon by setting them down as 

 sea-animals like craw-fish, which, when they come out of the 

 sea, are converted into stone,^ but the appearance of sea-shells 

 on mountains could hardly be so accounted for. Two alterna- 

 tives suggest themselves to explain the occurrence of shells 

 in such situations ; either the sea may have been up to the 

 mountain, or the mountain may have been down in the sea. 

 Modern geologists have in most cases to adopt the latter alter- 

 native, but till recent times the former was oftener than not 

 held to be the more probable. Water is the type of all that is 

 movable, fluctuating', unstable, while the firm earth is immov- 

 able, permanent, solid, and it is not to the purpose to argue 

 that modern knowledge has reversed this older view, with so 

 many other doctrines which seemed to rest on the plain evi- 

 dence of the senses, and only failed, as many of our own theo- 

 ries have no doubt to fail, from the narrowness of their range 

 of observation. 



The fossils imbedded in high ground have been appealed to, 

 both in ancient and modern times, both by savages and civi- 

 lized men, as evidence in support of their traditions of a flood, 

 and moreover the argument, apparently unconnected with any 

 tradition, is to be found, that because there are marine fossils 

 in places away from the sea, therefore the sea must once have 

 been there. In the Society Islands, tradition tells how a flood 

 that rose over the tops of the mountains, was raised by the 

 sea-god Ruahatu. A fisherman caught his hooks in the hair ox 

 the god as he lay sleeping among his coral groves, and woke 

 ' Tennent, ' Ceylon,' vol. i. p. 14. 



