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mountains, the deep, dark fiords, and the long dreary winters, 
with which the old Scandinavians were familiar. Their 
Paganism was sure to be of a sombre and even monstrous 
aspect. Hence their strange version of the Deluge. It was 
caused by the slaying of the giant Ymir, whose blood deluged 
the whole world and drowned its inhabitants, with the excep- 
tion of a giant who happened at the time to be on board 
ship ! 
According to the Druids, the story of the Deluge runs thus 
— In consequence of the universal wickedness of mankind, 
the Great God, by means of a violent wind, sent a virulent 
poison upon the earth. Death was inhaled with every breath. 
A holy patriarch, however, and his company, were shut up 
within strong doors, through which the poison penetrated not. 
The poisonous wind was succeeded by a tempest of fire, which 
rent the earth asunder. Then the sea was flung upon Britain, 
the rain descended in torrents, and the whole country was 
submerged. The flood which thus washed away the impurities 
of the land bore up the vessel in which the patriarch and his 
friends were preserved, till the waters had been drained off, 
and they commenced the cultivation of a renovated earth. 
In the New World we meet with similar traditions of the 
Deluge. A story comes down to us from the Aborigines of 
Cuba to the effect, that “ an old man, knowing the Deluge 
was to come, built a great ship and went into it with his 
family and abundance of animals, and that wearying during 
the continuance of the flood, he sent out a crow, which at first 
did not return, staying to feed on the dead bodies, but after- 
wards returned, bearing with it a green branch/'’ In Peru 
the Indians had a tradition that, long before the time of the 
Incas, the entire race, with the exception of six, who were 
saved on a float, were destroyed. Indeed, so universal did 
Humboldt find these traditions to be among the native tribes of 
America, and so remarkable in their resemblance to the 
Mosaic narrative of the Flood, that he at one time regarded 
them merely as fragments of the teaching of early missionaries ; 
but on mature consideration he abandoned this hypothesis. 
“He even set himself/ - ’ says Miller, in his Testimony of 
the Rocks, “when collecting the traditions of the Indians 
of the Orinoco, to examine whether the district was not a 
fossiliferous one, and whether beds of sea-shells or deposits 
charged with the petrified remains of corals, or of fishes, 
might not have originated among the Aborigines some mere 
myth of a great inundation sufficient to account for the 
appearances in the rocks. But he found that the region was 
mainly a primary one, in which he could detect only a single 
