I TRUST that the reader, who has followed me thus far in this argument, is satisfied that the legends of mankind point unmistakably to the fact that the earth, in some remote age—­before the Polynesians, Red-men, Europeans, and Asiatics had separated, or been developed as varieties out of one family—­met with a tremendous catastrophe; that a conflagration raged over parts of its surface; that mankind took refuge in the caves of the earth, whence they afterward emerged to wander for a long time, in great poverty and hardships, during a period of darkness; and that finally this darkness dispersed, and the sun shone again in the heavens.

I do not see how the reader can avoid these conclusions.

There are but two alternatives before him:  he must either suppose that all this concatenation of legends is the outgrowth of a prodigious primeval lie, or he must concede that it describes some event which really happened.

To adopt the theory of a great race-lie, originating at the beginning of human history, is difficult, inasmuch as these legends do not tell the same story in anything like the same way, as would have been the case had they all originated in the first instance from the same mind.  While we have the conflagration in some of the legends, it has

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been dropped out of others; in one it is caused by the sun; in another by the demon; in another by the moon; in one Phaëton produced it by driving the sun out of its course; while there are a whole body of legends in which it is the result of catching the sun in a noose.  So with the stories of the cave-life.  In some, men seek the caves to escape the conflagration; in others, their race began in the caves.  In like manner the age of darkness is in some cases produced by the clouds; in others by the death of the sun.  Again, in tropical regions the myth turns upon a period of terrible heat when there were neither clouds nor rain; when some demon had stolen the clouds or dragged them into his cave:  while in more northern regions the horrible age of ice and cold and snow seems to have made the most distinct impression on the memory of mankind.  In some of the myths the comet is a god; in others a demon; in others a serpent; in others a feathered serpent; in others a dragon; in others a giant; in others a bird in others a wolf; in others a dog; in still others a boar.

The legends coincide only in these facts:—­the monster in the air; the heat; the fire; the cave-life; the darkness; the return of the light.

In everything else they differ.

Surely, a falsehood, springing out of one mind, would have been more consistent in its parts than this.

The legends seem to represent the diverging memories which separating races carried down to posterity of the same awful and impressive events:  they remembered them in fragments and sections, and described them as the four blind men in the Hindoo story described the elephant;—­to one it was a tail, to another a trunk, to another a leg, to another a body;—­it needs to put all their stories together to make a consistent whole.  We can not understand