DELUGE

(Lat. diluvium.) In the 1650th year after the creation (according to ordinary chronology), in the GOOth year of the life of Noah, and on the 17th day of the second month (November, according to some commentators), the waters began to rise upon the earth. They appear to he represented as swelling upwards by some upheaving force (the fountains of the great deep were broken up), and descending also in continual rain for forty days and nights. All the mountains " that were under the whole heaven" were covered; "all flesh perished that moved on the earth,"animals whichwilhtheexceptionol'Noah and his family,and the entered with him into the Ark. The waters remained 150 days; and then '-returned from off the earth continually:" and the Ark rested on Ararat on the seventeenth day of the seventh month; and on the first day of the first month of the following year "the face of the ground was dry," but not completely drained of the wate i for nearly two months longer. Such is a very concise abridgement of the account of this great catastrophe containt il in the 7th and 8th chapters of Genesis. Two subjects connected with it require a brief discu ion — the parallel traditions of ancient mythology; and the conf in nation which the Mosaic account has been supposed by some to receive from the discoveries of modern geological science, which others have represented as directly opposed to it. As to the first, the belief in the destruction of mankind hy a deluge in the earliest times, and of the escape of one individual and family under circumstances resembling those recorded in sacred history respecting Noah, is a remarkable feature in the traditions of a great variety of na lions. The Fo-ki of the Chinese, the Satyavrata of the Indians. Xisuthrus or Seisithrus among the A yrians, Deucalion and Ogyges among the Greeks, — all present striking features of analogy to the patriarch of scripture even tfie Mexicans had their traditional deluge. These fragments of early belief are collected very copiously in the third volume of Bryant's Ancient Mythology. (See also Ru ell's Connexion of Sacred and Profane History, vol. ii.) It is undoubtedly true that some of these deluges may have been local inundations only; as, for example, the natural features of the The alian plain seem to account conclu lively for the tale of Deucalion. Still the universality ol these traditions, ami their general agreement as to circum stances, seem to point to some common source of in for mat ion. With regard to ecological theories of the deluge, it is per 326 [s. 340]