Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/273

Rh of the Hesperides, the lion slain by Gizdubar to the lion of Nemea which Hercules slew, and finally, just as Gizdubar is ferried across the waters of the dead, so Hercules is taken by Helios in the golden boat of the sun across the ocean.

As the Greeks have borrowed so much of the legend it would be surprising if they had not taken the rest, including the story of the deluge, and accordingly we find the Greeks provided with a legend of the flood, or with more than one, as they appear to have had more than one Heracles; but that which most closely accords with the Chaldean is the flood of Deukalion.

On the other hand, the Egyptians, who had sun stories of their own, did not borrow the legend of Gizdubar, and are silent as to a deluge; a fact of extreme importance when we consider that the Egyptian civilization was contemporaneous with the Chaldean, if not indeed older. The Nile is gentler in its overflowing than the Tigris, so that Egypt did not suffer under the scourge of unexpected floods.

If, finally, we turn to China, also possessed of very ancient historic records, and liable to the destructive deluges of the Yellow River, which have earned for it the designation "The Curse of China," we discover a deluge story of great importance, to which Suess has already called attention. In the third Schû of the Canon of Yao, a monarch who reigned, it is supposed, somewhere about and therefore contemporaneous with Khammurabi, we read: The Tî said, "Prince of the Four Mountains, destructive in their overflowings are the waters of the flood. In their wide extension they inclose the mountains and cover the great heights, threatening the heaven with their floods, so that the lower people is unruly and murmur. Where is a capable man whom I can employ this evil to overcome?" Khwan was engaged, but for nine years he labored in vain; a fresh engineer, named Yû, was therefore called in; within eight years he completed great works: he thinned the woods, regulated the streams, dammed them, and opened their mouths, provided the people with food, and acted as a great benefactor to the state.

It is refreshing thus to pass from the ornate deceptions of legend to the sober truth of history; and if the facts on which the Gizdubar legend of the deluge is founded could be expressed in the same simple language, we should probably find it narrating similar events, or events as little calculated to surprise us as those of the straightforward Chinese Schû.

History then fails to furnish evidence of any phenomenon which can be called catastrophic in the geologic sense of the word, and geology has no need to return to the catastrophism of its youth; in becoming evolutional it does not cease to remain essentially uniformitarian.