which appear wrong and unworthy. The neglect or violation of this feeling of obligation, awakens within him a sense of guilt and degradation, a consciousness of ill desert and an apprehension of punishment; while acting in accordance with it is followed by an inward peace and satisfaction and by a feeling of security. As this constitution comes from God, it must be regarded as a revelation of the moral attributes of his character, as indicating not only his approbation of right and disapprobation of wrong, but also his purpose respectively to reward and punish them. But under that government which God exercises over men in this world, partly through the nature with which he has endowed them, and partly through the circumstances under which he has placed them, although we see enough to confirm these indications of his character, we do not witness that complete vindication of the Divine justice which we should naturally expect. Virtue is evidently favored and vice is discountenanced and frowned upon, sufficiently so to leave no doubt as to the manner in which they are viewed by him; but there is not that exact meting out of rewards and punishinents which strict regard to their deserts would seem to require. Nay, more than this. In numerous instances, the good are allowed to endure hardship, to meet persecution, to pass their whole lives under circumstances of destitution and suffering, while the bad are permitted to enjoy, almost without, interruption, every form of worldly prosperity and happiness. It was the contemplation of such cases that led the Psalmist to exclaim, in bitterness of spirit, "Behold! these are the ungodly who prosper in the world; they increase in riches. They are not in trouble as other men, neither are they plagued like other men. Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain and washed my hands in innocency. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chastened every morning." Now only one explanation can be given of this apparent mystery, only one we mean in harmony with those natural sentiments of justice and right with which the Creator has endowed us. It is the explanation which the Psalmist himself immediately suggests, and to which the thoughts of devout and good men in all ages of the world have uniformly turned. It is the appointment to man of a future state, in which the wrongs of the present shall be righted, in which the righteous government of God, only commenced here, shall be carried on to completion, in which all the attributes of the Divine character shall receive a full and final vindication. If then the analogies of nature thus point to another and higher existence beyond the present, if especially the great and fundamental law of progress, having its origin, as there is reason to believe, in an 1849.] Deluges of Ogyges and Deucalion. 75 essential feature of the Divine character and illustrated by each successive event in the past history of our planet-a law too, in accordance with which we ourselves are constituted, if that require it, if the endowments and faculties of the human soul plainly fit it for such an existence; if, moreover, such an existence explain, and if it be the only thing that will explain what we see in this world consistently with those moral attributes which our whole being leads us to ascribe to its Author and Governor, who shall gainsay the doctrine? who would gainsay such a doctrine resting upon such evidence? Who would do aught to weaken in himself or in others a faith which thus has its foundations in reason no less than in revelation; which tends to strengthen all the higher aspirations and better impulses of our natures, which chastens the joys and tempers the sorrows of life, which spreads beauty over decay and death, and makes the tomb the portal to a higher and more glorious state of existence. ARTICLE IV. THE DELUGES OF OGYGES AND DEUCALION. The Deluges of Ogyges and Deucalion: were they real and specific events, or were they altered traditions of a universal deluge? By M. Cuvier. Translated from the French, as given in Ovid's Works, Oxford edition, 1826, Vol. 3d. By GEOLOGISTS have admitted, from the actual state of the superficial strata of the terrestrial globe, that the surface of our planet must have experienced, at an epoch relatively not far remote, a grand revolution, which engulphed beneath its waters the continents then inhabited by men, and from which there escaped but a small number of individuals, the sole ancestors of the nations who successively repeopled the new lands which that same revolution disclosed. Divers nations have preserved a tradition, more or less confused, of this catastrophe, whence recommences, necessarily, the history of men, such as has been transmitted to us; and, what is very remarkable, those nations who have preserved the slightest relations with one another have yet agreed in placing this event at about the same time, that is to say, from 4,000 to 5,000 years before the year now current (1820). к Every one indeed knows that the books of Moses, according to the text of the Septuagint, (which allows the longest interval between the deluge and us,) do not place the deluge higher than 5340 years ago; and according to the Hebrew text, whose chronology is the shortest, than 4168, following the calculation of Usher, or 4393 following that of Freret. But few have remarked that the dates given to this catastrophe by the Chaldeans, the Chinese, the Hindoos, and the Greeks, are very nearly the same. The authors who have written in Chaldee, in Syriac, or who, by their means, have consulted the ancient traditions, as Berosus, Hieronymus, Nicolas of Damascus, agree in speaking of a deluge. Berosus describes it with circumstances so similar to those of Genesis, that it is almost impossible that what he says of it should not have been drawn from the same sources. It is true that, so far as one can judge from the scattered extracts which Josephus (Lib. I. c. 3), Eusebius (Praep. Ev. Lib. IX. c.12), and Syncellus (p. 30) have given us of his writings, he has removed the epoch a great number of centuries; but those numerous centuries, that long line of kings between Xixuthrus? and Ninus, is something novel and peculiar to him. Ctesias,3 who is anterior to him, had no such idea; nor have they been adopted by any profane authors posterior to Berosus. Justin and Velleius consider Ninus the first of conquerors, and do not place him more than forty-two centuries anterior to the present time. The Armenian authors of the middle ages, who have collected the traditions concerning Xixuthrus, and perhaps extracted the ancient chronicles of their country make it reach back a little further (to 4916 years), according to M. M. Cirbied and Martin (Researches on the Ancient History of Asia, p. 26). It is true that the principal of these authors, Moses Chorenensis, was a Christian and had known Eusebius; nevertheless, it is certain that the tradition of the deluge existed in Armenia long before him. The city which, according to Josephus, was called the Place of the Descent, exists still at the foot of Mt. Ararat, and bears the name of Nakchevan, meaning place of the descent. See the Preface of the brothers Whiston, on Moses Chorenensis, p. iv. The Chinese commence in Chouking, their authentic history, by a 1 Berosus, a Babylonian historian, priest of the temple of Belus, lived in the time of Alexander. Hieronymus, of Cardia in the Thracian Chersonesus, a companion of Alexander. Nicholas of Damascus, friend of Herod the Great, wrote 144 books. 2 Noah, by Chaldean tradition. 3 Greek historian, age of Artaxerxes Mnemon 1849.] Greek Traditions. 77 deluge occurring under Yao, and whose epoch would be but 4117 years anterior to the present time. The Hindoos admit, in their sacred books, many revolutions, of which the last, called Caliyong, took place about 4924 years since. The Greeks, who have always confounded everything, because their later authors have wished to consider as positive facts, the vague traditions or mythological allegories of their ancient priests and poets; -the Greeks, I say, speak of two deluges, whose epochs they pretend to assign, but to which they add circumstances irreconcilable among themselves, and even with the epochs. Of those yet obscure deluges of Homer and Hesiod, the first is that called the deluge of Ogyges, said to have occurred in Attica and Bootia. Its date as fixed by Varro, and referred by Censorinus1 in his book entitled Natal Day, c. 21, to 1600 years before the first Olym piad, reaches back to 4196 years, that is, to within 28 years of the epoch fixed for the deluge of Noah by the Hebrew text of Genesis, after the calculation of Usher. Varro expressly places this deluge four centuries before Inachus; and every one knows that Varro passed, in his time, for a man who displayed the greatest erudition and judg ment in chronology. Meanwhile it appears that Acusilaus2 and Hellanicus, the first authors known who have spoken of the deluge of Ogyges, and from whence Plato, in the Timaeus, pag. m. 524, Clement of Alexandria, in the Stromata I. p. m. 321, and Eusebius, Praep. Ev. X. p. m. 489, have extracted what we know of it, placed it one hundred years after Inachus in the time of Phoroneus, consequently more than five hundred years later than Varro; but since this synchronism hinders neither those authors nor many others from making Phoroneus the first man, it is manifest that the traditions which they had of it were mingled with fables, and really appertain to nothing but mythology. The second of these deluges is that of Deucalion. The most ancient author extant who mentions this deluge is Pindar, Olymp. Od. IX. He makes Deucalion land on Parnassus, establish himself in the village of Protogenia (first birth), and there reproduce his people with stones; in one word, he already refers to the whole human race, though applying it to one nation only, the fable afterwards generalized; -as we see in Ovid (Met. I. v. 399). Moreover, the most ancient Greek historians whom time has preserved for us, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, make no mention of any deluge, neither of the time of Ogyges, nor of the time of Deuca ' Rom. historians-Varro fl. A. D. 114, Censo. A. D. 238. 2 Greek hist.-Acu. flor. B. C. 450, Hel. B. C. 460. lion, although they name Deucalion and speak of him as one of the first Grecian kings. They seem even then to have considered these great inundations as appertaining to times anterior to history, or as making part of mythology. What Herodotus says, that Thessaly must have once formed a lake, before the Peneus found an outlet between Ossa and Olympus, is but one of those geological hypotheses, applicable to any particular country, and such as we daily see in our own times. Herodotus makes no application of this to Deucalion nor to his deluge, although this, assuredly, was an occasion very natural to speak of a like event. But soon after the age of Herodotus, philosophers, to accredit either their physical systems, or their moral and political romances, availed themselves of this tradition and attributed to it an extension greater or less, according as it suited their ideas. Plato, in the Timaeus says but few words in commencing his recital of the grand catastrophe which, according to him, destroyed the Atlantis; but in those few words, he places the name of Deucalion immediately after that of Phoroneus, without any mention of Ogyges. Aristotle, Meteor. I. 14, seems to consider the deluge of Deucalion as a local inundation, which occurred near Dodona and the river Archelous, places different from those of the ordinary locality, since he is at the same time treating of a Dodona and an Archelous in Phocis ; as Clavier also, on Apollodorus, Vol. II. p. 79, seems to me to have clearly established. In Apollodorus, Bibl. Lib. I. § 7, the deluge of Deucalion resumes something of its grandeur, and all of its mythological character. It happened at the epoch of the transition from the brazen to the iron age; Deucalion is the son of the Titan Prometheus, the fabricator of men ; after the cataclysm he created anew the human race with stones; and yet, even according to Apollodorus himself, it inundated only Greece out of the Peloponnesus and Isthmus; as if all Greece out of the Peloponnesus and Isthmus could have been inundated, without a multitude of other countries and the Peloponnesus itself which is no higher than Greece, being inundated also. Diodorus, Lib. I. p. m. 10, does not assign to this catastrophe so narrow limits, since he conjectures its effects might have extended even to Upper Egypt. The tradition of Phrygia relative to Annacus or Nannacus, who was a sort of precursor of Deucalion, supposes also that that deluge extended over Asia Minor, and even destroyed the whole human race; for it is only after this deluge that the tradition places Prometheus, commissioned by Jupiter to reproduce the species. It is true that this |