The history of nations confirms the testimony of the fossils and of the rocks. The chronology of none of the nations of the West can be traced unbroken farther back than 3,000 years. The Pentateuch, the most ancient document the world possesses, and all subsequent writings allude to a universal deluge, and the Pentateuch and Vedas and Chou-king date this catastrophe as not more than 5,400 years before our time. Is it possible that mere chance gave a result so striking as to make the traditional origin of the Assyrian, Indian, and Chinese monarchies agree in being as remote as 4,000 or 5,000 years back? Would the ideas of nations with so little inter-communication, whose language, religion, and laws have nothing in common, agree on this point if they were not founded on truth? Even the American Indians have their Noah or Deucalion, like the Indians, Babylonians, and Greeks.
It may be said that the long existence of ancient nations is attested by their progress in astronomy. But this progress has been much exaggerated. But what would this astronomy prove even if it were more perfect? Have we calculated the progress which a science would make in the bosom of nations which had no other? If among the multitude of persons solely occupied with astronomy, even then, all that these people knew might have been discovered in a few centuries, when only 300 years intervened between Copernicus and Laplace.
Again, it has been pretended that the zodiacal figures on ancient temples give proof of a remote antiquity; but the question is very complicated, and there are as many opinions as writers, and certainly no conclusions against the newness of continents and nations can be based on such evidence. The zodiac itself has been considered a proof of antiquity, but the arguments brought forward are undoubtedly unsound.
Even if these various astronomical proofs were as certain as they are unconvincing, what conclusion could we draw against the great catastrophe so indisputably demonstrated? We should only have the right to conclude that astronomy was among the sciences preserved by those persons whom the catastrophe spared.
In conclusion, if there be anything determined in geology, it is that the surface of our globe has been subjected to a revolution within 5,000 years, and that this revolution buried the countries formerly inhabited by man and modern animals, and left the bottom of the former sea dry as a habitation for the few individuals it spared. Consequently, our present human societies have arisen since this catastrophe.
But the countries now inhabited had been inhabited before, as fossils show, by animals, if not by mankind, and had been overwhelmed by a previous deluge; and, indeed, judging by the different orders of animal fossils we find, they had perhaps undergone two or three irruptions of the sea.