I copy this map, not to show how much more we know than poor Cosmos, but because he taught that all around this habitable world there was yet another world, adhering closely on all sides to the circumscribing walls of heaven.  “Upon the eastern side of this transmarine land he judges man was created; and that there the paradise of gladness was located, such as here on the eastern edge is described, where it received our first parents, driven out of Paradise to that extreme point of land on the sea-shore.  Hence, upon the coming of the Deluge, Noah and his sons were borne by the ark to the earth we now inhabit.  The four rivers he supposes to be gushing up the spouts of Paradise.”  They are depicted on the above map:  O is the Mediterranean Sea; P, the Arabian Gulf; L, the Caspian Sea; Q, the Tigris; M, the river Pison; “and J, the land where men dwelt before the Flood.”

It will be observed that, while he locates Paradise in the east, he places the scene of the Deluge in the west; and he supposes that Noah came from the scene of the Deluge to Europe.

This shows that the traditions in the time of Cosmos looked to the west as the place of the Deluge, and that after the Deluge Noah came to the shores of the Mediterranean.  The fact, too, that there was land in the west beyond the ocean is recognized by Cosmos, and is probably a dim echo from Atlantean times.

Map of Europe, after Cosmos

The following rude cut, from Cosmos, represents the high mountain in the north behind which the sun hid himself at night, thus producing the alternations of day and night.  His solar majesty is just getting behind the mountain, while Luna looks calmly on at the operation.  The mountain is as crooked as Culhuacan, the crooked mountain of Atzlan described by the Aztecs.

The mountain the sun goes behind at night

CHAPTER V

The deluge legends of America.

“It is a very remarkable fact,” says Alfred Maury, “that we find in America traditions of the Deluge coming infinitely nearer to that of the Bible and the Chaldean religion than among any people of the Old World.  It is difficult to suppose that the emigration that certainly took place from Asia into North America by the Kourile and Aleutian Islands, and still does so in our day, should have brought in these memories, since no trace is found of them among those Mongol or Siberian populations which were fused with the natives of the New World. . . .  The attempts that have been made to trace the origin of Mexican civilization to Asia have not as vet led to any sufficiently conclusive facts.  Besides, had Buddhism, which we doubt, made its way into America, it could not have introduced a myth not found in its own scriptures.  The cause of these similarities between the diluvian traditions of the nations of the New World and that of the Bible remains therefore unexplained.”