“’In the greater Panathenae there was carried in procession a peplum of Minerva, representing the war with the giants and the victory of the gods of Olympus.  In the lesser Panathenae they carried another peplum (covered with symbolic devices), which showed how the Athenians, supported by Minerva, had the advantage in the war with the Atlantes.’  A scholia quoted from Proclus by Humboldt and Boeckh says:  ’The historians who speak of the islands of the exterior sea tell us that in their time there were seven islands consecrated, to Proserpine, and three others of immense extent, of which the first was consecrated to Pluto, the second to Ammon, and the third to Neptune.  The inhabitants of the latter had preserved a recollection (transmitted to them by their ancestors) of the island of Atlantis, which was extremely large, and for a long time held sway over all the islands of the Atlantic Ocean.  Atlantis was also consecrated to Neptune."’ (See Humboldt’s “Histoire de la Geographie du Nouveau Continent,” vol. i.)

No one can read these legends and doubt that the Flood watt an historical reality.  It is impossible that in two different places in the Old World, remote from each other, religious ceremonies should have been established and perpetuated from age to age in memory of an event which never occurred.  We have seen that at Athens and at Hierapolis, in Syria, pilgrims came from a distance to appease the god of the earthquake, by pouring offerings into fissures of the earth said to have been made at the time Atlantis was destroyed.

More than this, we know from Plato’s history that the Athenians long preserved in their books the memory of a victory won over the Atlanteans in the early ages, and celebrated it by national festivals, with processions and religious ceremonies.

It is too much to ask us to believe that Biblical history, Chaldean, Iranian, and Greek legends signify nothing, and that even religious pilgrimages and national festivities were based upon a myth.

I would call attention to the farther fact that in the Deluge legend of the Isle of Cos the hero of the affair was Merops.  Now we have seen that, according to Theopompus, one of the names of the people of Atlantis was “Meropes.”

But we have not reached the end of our Flood legends.  The Persian Magi possessed a tradition in which the waters issued from the oven of an old woman.  Mohammed borrowed this story, and in the Koran he refers to the Deluge as coming from an oven.  “All men were drowned save Noah and his family; and then God said, ’O earth, swallow up thy waters; and thou, O heaven, withhold thy rain;’ and immediately the waters abated.”

In the bardic poems of Wales we have a tradition of the Deluge which, although recent, under the concise forms of the triads, is still deserving of attention.  As usual, the legend is localized in the country, and the Deluge counts among three terrible catastrophes of the island of Prydian, or Britain, the other two consisting of devastation by fire and by drought.