108 ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF 



dered the plains impassable.* The date of Yao is, by some, fixed 

 4163 years before the present time ; according to others, at 3943 years. 

 Tlie variety of opinions on this epoch extends even to 284 years. 



Some pages further on we find Yu, a minister and engineer, re-es- 

 tablishing the course of the waters, forming dykes, digging canals, 

 and regulating the taxes of every province in China, that is to say, 

 in an empire of six hundred leagues in every direction. The impos- 

 sibility of such operations, after such events, shows that the whole is 

 but a moral or political romance. f 



More modern historians have added a series of emperors before 

 Yao, but with a great many fabulous circumstances, without venturing 

 to assign fixed dates to them, varying incessantly one with the 

 other, even in number and names, and not being approved of by many 

 of their countrymen, Fouhi, with his serpent's body, his bull's head, 

 and tortoise's teeth, and his successors not less monstrous, are as ab- 

 surd, and have had no more reality than Enceladus and Briareus. 



Is it possible that mere chance gave a result so striking as to make 

 the traditional origin of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese monarch- 

 ies agree in being as remote as 4000 years back ? "Would the ideas of 

 nations, who have had so little communication with each other, whose 

 language, religion, and laws, have nothing in common, agree on this 

 point, if they were not founded on truth ? 



We will not ask for precise dates from the Americans, who had no 

 ifeal writing, and ■\yhose most ancient traditions gO" no further back 

 than to some few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards ; and 

 yet we still imagine that we can detect traces of the deluge in their 

 rough hieroglyphics. They have their Noah, or their Deucalion, like 

 the Indians, the Babylonians, and the Greeks. J 



The negroes, the most degraded of human beings, whose forms are 

 the nearest to those of brutes, and whose intellect has nowhere ex- 

 panded so greatly as to attain a regular government, nor to the least 

 semblance of connected information, have preserved no records, no 

 traditions. They cannot then afford us any information concerning 

 our inquiry, although all their characters clearly show that they es- 

 caped from the great catastrophe by some other point than the Cauca- 

 sian and Altaic races, from whom they were probably separated long 

 before this catastrophe happened. 



* Chou-King. French translation, p. 9. 



f It is the Yu-King, or chap. 1, of the second part of the Chou-King, pp. 43 — 60. 

 X See the admirable and splendid work of M. de Humboldt, on the Mountains 

 of Mexico. 



