There are also in connection with this question of universality certain scientific and historical facts already referred to which we may again summarise here, and which are essential to the understanding of the question. Nothing is more certainly known in geology than that at the close of the later tertiary or pleistocene age the continents of the northern hemisphere stood higher and spread their borders more widely than at present. In this period also they were tenanted by a very grand and varied mammalian fauna, and it is in this continental age of the later pleistocene or early modern time that we find the first unequivocal evidence of man as existing on various parts of the continents. At the close of this period occurred changes, whether sudden or gradual we do not know, though they could not have occupied a very long time, which led to the extinction of the earliest races of men and many contemporaneous animals. That these changes were in part, at least, of the nature of submergence we learn from the fact that our present continents are more sunken or less elevated out of the water, and also from the deposit of superficial gravels and other detritus more recent than the pleistocene over their surfaces. We are thus shut up by geological facts to the belief in a Deluge geologically modern and practically universal.
One other objection to the Deluge narrative perhaps deserves a word of comment—that urged against the statement of the gradual disappearance of the waters. The extraordinary difficulty is raised respecting this, that the water must have rushed seaward in a furious torrent. The objection is based apparently on the idea that the foundation for the original narrative was a river inundation in the Mesopotamian plain. This cannot be admitted; but if it were, the objection would not apply. River inundations, whether of the Nile or Euphrates, subside inch by inch, not after the manner of mountain torrents. Thus this objection is another instance of difficulties gratuitously imported into the history.
In point of fact the narrator represents the Deluge as prevailing for a whole year, which would be impossible in the case of a river inundation. He attributes it in part, at least, to the 'great deep'—that is, the ocean; and he represents the ark as drifting inland or toward the north. Such conditions can be satisfied only by the supposition of a subsidence of the land similar in kind, at least, to the great post-glacial flood of geology. Partial subsidences of this kind, local but very extreme, have occurred even in later times, as, for instance, in the Runn of Cutch, the delta of the Mississippi, and the delta of the Nile; and if the objectors are determined to make the Deluge of Noah very local and more recent than the post-glacial flood, it would be more rational to refer to subsidences like those just mentioned, and of which they will find examples in Lyell's Principles and other geological books. It is, however, decidedly more probable that Noah's Flood is identical with that which destroyed the men of the mammoth age, the palæocosmic or 'palæolithic' men; [57] and in that case the recession of the waters would probably be gradual, but intermittent, 'going and returning,' as our ancient narrator has it; but there need not have been any violent débâcle.
[57] Modern Science in Bible Lands, chaps. iii. and iv.
It is also to be noted that a submergence of the land and consequent deluge may be cataclysmic or tranquil, according to local circumstances, and that it may have been locally sudden, while for the whole world it was gradual and of longer duration. Such differences must belong to all great submergences, which may in one place produce great disturbance and very coarse deposits, in another may be quiet and deposit the finest silt. Even the flood of a river or the action of a tide admits of variations of this kind. In narrow channels the great tides of the Bay of Fundy rush as torrents; in wide bays they creep in imperceptibly.
The traditions and Biblical history of the Deluge not only furnish important material for connecting the geological ages with the period of human history, and for enabling us to realise the fact that early man was a witness of some of the later physical and vital vicissitudes that have passed over the earth, but may be correlated with other ancient traditions which seem at first sight to have no immediate relation to it.
As an example, I may refer to the well-known Egyptian fable of Atlantis, which may be a reminiscence of early man in the second continental period, and which we may, perhaps, even connect with the Mexican tradition of civilisation reaching America from the East. [58]
[58] It is, perhaps, only an accident that Atl is the Mexican word for water.
Plato has handed down to us a circumstantial tradition, derived from Egypt, of a great Atlantic continent west of Europe, once thickly peopled, and the seat of an empire that was dominant over the Mediterranean regions. This continent, or island, was called Atlantis, and it had been submerged with all its people in prehistoric times. This tradition may have reference to certain geological facts of the early modern period already referred to. If the Egyptian tradition really extended back to the antediluvian period, we can readily understand their belief in the continent of Atlantis. We have already ascertained the great extension in that period of the land of Western Europe, and there may have been outlying insular tracts in the Atlantic now quite unknown to us. These lands may well have sustained nations of the gigantic Cro-magnon race, 'men of renown,' who, when their westward progress was stayed by the ocean, and they were checked in the north by the increasing cold, may have turned their arms against the dwellers on the Mediterranean coasts, perhaps in the age immediately preceding the Deluge. We know little as yet of the history of those Horshesu, or children of Horus, who are said to have preceded the historic period in Egypt. There must have been Egyptian literature about these people, and should this be recovered we shall probably learn more of Atlantis. In the meantime we may, at least, bring the tradition of that perished continent into harmony with geology and history. I may add that we need not consider the above view as at variance with that of those archæologists who, like the late Sir D. Wilson, [59] suppose the tradition of Atlantis to have been founded on vague intimations of the existence of America, since any such intimations which reached the civilised nations of Southern Europe or Africa would naturally be considered as an indication that some part of the lost Atlantis still continued to exist.
[59] The Lost Atlantis, 1892.