GLACIAL, EPOCH UPON THE EARLY HISTORY OE MANKIND. 73 
written ; but that rather, when a systematic geological survey of the 
Euphrates-Tigris basin shall have been carried out — such as that 
which has been accomplished in recent years for the Nile-basin 
under the directorship of my friend Captain H. G. Lyons, D.Sc., 
E.R.S. — a good deal of what has been written by Professor Driver 
of Oxford in his work on Genesis (pp. 99-108 of the latest edition) 
will probably have to be re-written. It would be no compliment to 
a man in Dr. Driver’s position to suppose that he himself believes 
that in the single paragraph (pp. 102, 103, op. cit.) in which he 
notices Professor Prestwich’s views, as they were put before the 
Victoria Institute some years ago, he has done justice to a paper 
occupying twenty-two pages of the Institute’s Journal of Transactions, 
with the sixteen pages of a closely-printed report of the discussion 
thereupon, in which many of the foremost geologists of the day took 
part. Such regional oscillations of level of the lithosphere relatively 
to the hydrosphere would, in the nature of things, and as shown in 
Prestwich’s great paper on the Piubble Drift, be differential ; and 
Dr. Wright’s instance of a raised beach 750 feet above the present 
level of the Black Sea, gives us some indication of the great 
vertical range of such differential movements, and points as a finger- 
post to other possible differential movements in connection with the 
great elevated region of Asia Minor and Armenia, which might give 
us all we need to enable us to realise the actuality of such a 
catastrophe as is implied in the Genesis narrative of the “ Noachian 
Deluge,” when due allowance is made for those elaborate and 
hyperbolic habits of expression, on which the author of a recent 
work on “ the Magi”* (along with Sir William Eamsay, LL.D.) has 
laid special stress, as characteristic of the Oriental mind. 
There are two minor points in Dr. Wright’s paper open to 
criticism — (i) his use of the word “ cataract ” for a waterfall, the 
former word having been associated for centuries with certain 
features in the Nile channel, while we are told in the latest 
monograph issued by the Egyptian Survey Department (1907) that 
“ there is nothing about the Nile cataracts in any way resembling 
the falls of Niagara or even the falls of the Rhine at Schaff hausen ” ; 
and (ii) it has been shown in the great monograph on the “ Physio- 
* The Magi : how they recognised Christ's Star, by Lieut. -Colonel G. 
Mackinlay (Hodcler and Stoughton, 1907). 
F 2 
