Page:The Deluge in Other Literatures and History.djvu/5

 The phenomena of the sky and especially of the sun are daily miracles. The deluge of these stories has been transferred from the skies to the earth. It is an ether myth. The attempt to explain the existence of the world on the basis of an ether myth was not uncommon. The deluge was not the last of these destructions. Some races supposed a great fire to have swept over the earth and to have destroyed all save a few who hid themselves in caves."

4. We may understand the basis of the deluge story to be a legend transmitting historical memories which, though mythical and colored, have still the fate of actual men as their subject — an historical origin.

This is the view advanced by Delitzsch.

5. We may regard the deluge as a historical fact preserved in a multitude of forms. Here several points deserve consideration. (a) Every nation, it is asserted by Lenormant, except the black race, has a tradition of the deluge. (b) This tradition wherever found is essentially the same. (c) We may grant that in America and in Oceanica it is not independent but an early importation. (d) Granting this, however, it remains true that a tradition is found in the Indo-European, the Semitic, the Egyptian, or Hamitic families. (e) These facts do not permit us to assume as the origin of these stories a myth either naturalistic or cosmogonic, because as Delitzsch has said, the story is too specifically human, because, further, it is too universal, and still further, because such an explanation partakes too much of the arbitrary. (f) Nor is the historical element so slight as to allow us to call it, with Delitzsch, a legend. The deluge is an historical