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been illustrated and confirmed by that narrative, of which all other 
records are but faint adumbrations. If all the solitary fragments 
scattered throughout the voluminous mass of oriental mythology, 
joined with those which the nations of the west have retained, 
were collected and concentrated, their united testimony would be 
insufficient to establish the reality of this calamitous prodigy. It 
* is not on the exact coincidence of sacred and profane history, that 
we attempt to prove the truth, and assume the superiority of the 
former; but that the one is perspicuous and full, where the other 
is obscure and defective: the one is concise where amplification 
would be unnecessary, or would tend to no other purpose than the 
gratification of a vain curiosity; the other, by those additions 
which the artifice or conceit of man has interwoven, has sometimes 
suppressed the truth by concealment, and sometimes weakened it 
by expansion / 5 
“In common with other nations, the Hindoos attribute the 
creation of all visible things in six distinct periods, the successive 
formation of all terrestrial animals, and finally of man, to one 
Supreme God. In common with all other nations, they have also 
preserved some indistinct remembrance of the antediluvian gene- 
rations, and the antediluvian personages mentioned in the Jewish 
scriptures. But the first great and important event, which they 
attest, clearly and unequivocally, is the awful catastrophe of the 
general destruction of the world by a flood; and therefore it is 
from that point, that the monuments of profane antiquity are 
properly called in, to confirm the truth of the sacred history . 55 
“ Distinguished as the whole recital of the deluge is in the 
Hindoo Purana, by that mixture of the puerile and sublime, which 
