[1.  “The North Americans of Antiquity,” p. 499.]

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Here we have the whole story told in little:  “Fire fell from heaven,” the comet; “the sun itself was on fire”; the comet reached to, or appeared to reach to, the sun; or its head had fallen into the sun; or the terrible object may have been mistaken for the sun on fire. “There was a rain of gravel”—­the Drift fell from the comet.  There is also some allusion to the sandstones scattered about; and we have another reference to the great breaks in the earth’s crust, caused either by the shock of contact with the comet, or the electrical disturbances of the time; and we are told that the trap-rocks, and rocks of vermilion color, boiled up to the surface with great tumult.  Mankind was destroyed, except such as fled into the seas and lakes, and there plunged into the water, and lived like “goslings.”

Can any one suppose that this primitive people invented all this?  And if they did, how comes it that their invention agreed so exactly with the traditions of all the rest of mankind; and with the revelations of science as to the relations between the trap rocks and the gravel, as to time at least?

We turn now to the legends of a different race, in a different stage of cultivation—­the barbarian Indians of California and Nevada.  It is a curious and wonderful story: 

“The natives in the vicinity of Lake Tahoe ascribe its origin to a great natural convulsion.  There was a time, they say, when their tribe possessed the whole earth, and were strong numerous, and rich; but a day came in which a people rose up stronger than they, and defeated and enslaved them.  Afterward the Great Spirit sent an immense wave across the continent from the sea, and this wave ingulfed both the oppressors and the oppressed, all but a very small remnant.  Then the task-masters made the remaining people raise up a great temple, so that

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they, of the ruling caste, should have a refuge in case of another flood, and on the top of this temple the masters worshiped a column of perpetual fire.”

It would be natural to suppose that this was the great deluge to which all the legends of mankind refer, and which I have supposed, elsewhere, to refer to the destruction of “Atlantis”; but it must be remembered that both east and west of the Atlantic the traditions of mankind refer to several deluges—­to a series of catastrophes—­occurring at times far apart.  It may be that the legend of the Tower of Babel refers to an event far anterior in time even to the deluge of Noah or Deucalion; or it may be, as often happens, that the chronology of this legend has been inverted.

The Tahoe legend continues: