Essay on the Theory of the Earth

by baron Georges Cuvier

A few pages farther on we find one Yu, a minister and engineer, re-establishing the courses of the waters, raising embankments, digging canals, and regulating the taxes of all the provinces in China, that is to say, in an empire extending 600 leagues in all directions. But the impossibility of such operations, after such events, shews clearly that the whole is nothing else than a moral and political romance[179].

More modern Chinese historians have added a series of emperors before Yao, but with a multitude of fabulous circumstances, without venturing to assign them fixed epochs. These writers are at perpetual variance with each other, even regarding the number and names of their emperors, and are not universally approved by their countrymen. Fouhi, with the body of a serpent, the head of an ox, and the teeth of a tortoise, together with his successors, who are not less monstrous, are altogether absurd, and have no more existed than Enceladon and Briareus.

Is it possible that mere chance could have produced so striking a result, as to make the traditional origin of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese monarchies agree in being referred to an epoch of nearly 4000 years from the present period? Would the ideas of nations which have had so little communication with each other, and whose language, religion, and laws are altogether different, have corresponded upon this point, had they not been founded upon truth?

We could not expect precise dates from the natives of America, who had no real writings, and whose oldest traditions extended only to a few centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. And yet, even among them, traces of a deluge are imagined to be found in their rude hieroglyphics. They have their Noah, or Deucalion, as well as the Indians, Babylonians, and Greeks[180].

The Negroes, the most degraded race among men, whose forms approach the nearest to the brutes, and whose intellect has not yet arrived at the institution of regular governments, or at any thing having the least appearance of systematic knowledge, have preserved no sort of annals or traditions. They cannot, therefore, afford us any information on the subject of our present researches, though all their characters clearly shew us that they have escaped from the great catastrophe, at another point than the Caucasian and Altaic races, from which they had perhaps been separated for a long time previous to the occurrence of that catastrophe.

But if the ancients, it is argued, have left no history, their long existence as nations is not the less attested by the advances which they have made in astronomy, by observations whose date is easily determined, and even by monuments which still remain, and which themselves bear their dates. Thus, the length of the year, such as the Egyptians are supposed to have determined it, according to the heliacal rising of Sirius, proves correct for a period comprised between the year 3000 and the year 1000 before Christ, a period to which the traditions of their conquests and of the great prosperity of their empire also refer. This accuracy proves to what perfection they had carried their observations, and shews that they had for many ages applied themselves to such investigations.

In order to determine the force of this argument, it is necessary that we should here enter upon some explanations.

The solstice is the moment of the year at which the rise of the Nile commences, and that which the Egyptians must have observed with most attention. Having, at the beginning, made, from imperfect observations, a civil or sacred year of three hundred and sixty-five days complete, they would preserve it from superstitious motives, even after they had perceived that it did not agree with the natural or tropical year, and did not bring back the seasons to the same days[181]. However, it was this tropical year which it behoved them to mark for the purpose of directing them in their agricultural operations.

They would, therefore, have to search in the heavens for an apparent sign of its return, and they imagined they had found this sign when the sun returned to the same position, relatively to some remarkable star. Thus they applied themselves, like almost all nations who are beginning this inquiry, to observe the heliacal risings and settings of the stars. We know that they chose particularly the heliacal rising of Sirius, at first, doubtless, on account of the beauty of the star; and, especially, because, in those ancient times, this rising of Sirius being nearly coincident with the solstice, and indicative of the inundation, was to them the most important phenomenon of this kind. Hence it was that Sirius, under the name of Sothis, occupied so conspicuous a place in their mythology, and in their religious ceremonies. Supposing, therefore, that the return of the heliacal rising of Sirius and the tropical year were of the same duration, and believing, at length, that this duration was 365 days and a quarter, they would imagine a period after which the tropical year and the old year, the sacred year of 365 days only, would return to the same day; a period which, according to these incorrect data, was necessarily 1461 sacred years, and 1460 of those improved years to which they gave the name of years of Sirius.