Human Origins

buted to Giants-Chinese and American Traditions-Traditions of Origin of Man-Philosophical Myths-Cruder Myths from Stones, Trees, and Animals-Totems-Recent Events soon forgotten-Autochthonous Nations-W

ogy-By Ethnology-By History-How Deluge Myths arise-Local Floods-Sea Shells on Mountains-Solar Myths-Deluge of Hasisadra-Noah's

rely on scientific facts and reasons, we have to traverse an intermediate stage in which legends and traditions still cast a dim and glimmering twilight

ds which are found so abundantly in many countries are everywhere taken for thunderbolts or fairy arrows shot down from the skies. This belief was well-nigh universal throughout the world; we find it in all the classical nations, in modern Europe, in China, Japan, and India. Its antiquity is attested by the fact that neolithic arrow-heads have been found attached as amulets in necklaces from Egyptian and Etruscan tombs, and pal?olithic celts in the foundations of Chald?an

cerauni," or stone-celts, taken to be thunderbolts, were formed in the air during storms. They are already described by Pliny, and a Chinese Encyclop?dia says that "some of these lightning stones have the shape of a hatchet, others of a knife, some a

nt period, are vastly more mystical. A single specimen may suffice which is quoted by Tylor in his Early History of Mankind. Tollius in 1649 figures some ordinary pal?olithic stone axes and hammers, and tells us that "the naturalists say they are generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in

els had been driven from heaven into the fiery abyss. These speculations, however, of later ages are of less importance for our present purpose than the fact that in no single inst

ation of the empire under Menes and the commencement of history.[6] And yet no tradition, with a pretence to be historical, goes back farther than with a very dim and nickering light for a few centuries before Menes, when the Horsheshu, or priests of Horus, ruled independent cities, and small districts attached to the temples. There are accounts of some passages of the Todtenbuch being taken from old hymns written on goatskin in the time of these Horsheshu, and of historical temples b

tes, in proof of the assertion, that he had seen himself "so huge a molar tooth of a man, that it would cut up into a hundred teeth of ordinary men,"-doubtless the molar of a fossil elephant. Marcus Scaurus brought to Rome from Joppa the bones of the monster who was to have devoured Andromeda. The Chinese Encyclop?dia, already referred to, describes the "Fon-shu, an animal which dwells in the extreme cold on the coast of the Northern Sea, which resemb

an priest, who wears a mask of an animal with a trunk resembling an elephant or mastodon; and certain vague traditions among some of the Red Indian tribes speak of an animal with an arm protruding from its shoulder. It is more probable, however, that these may have been derived from tr

abundant at high levels that they could not fail to be observed, and, if observed, to be attributed to the sea having once covered these levels, and inundated all the ea

ulations as to his origin. These speculations have taken a form corresponding very much to the stage of culture and civilization to which he had attained. They are of almost infinite variety, but may be classed generally under three heads. Those nations which had attained a sufficient degree of culture to personify first causes and the phenomena of Nature as gods, attribute the creation of the world and of man to some on

plain what remains to this day the perplexing problem of the origin of evil. These philosophical myths are, however, very various among different nations. Thus the orthodox belief of 200,000,000 of Hindoos is that mankind were created in castes, the Brahmins b

nes. Thus we find the stone theory very widely diffused. Even with a people so far advanced as the early Greeks, it meets us in the celebrated fable of Deucalion and Pyrrha peopling the earth by throwing stones behind them, which turned into men and women; and the same myth, of stones turning into the first men, meets us at the present day in almost every reliable myth of creation, brought home by missionaries and anthropologists from Africa, A

as descendants of some great bear or elk, or of some extremely wise fox or beaver, and held this belief so firmly, that intermarriage among members of the same totem was considered to be incestuous. The same system prevails among most races at an equally low or lower stage of civilization, as in Australia; and there are traces of its having existed among old civilized nations at remote periods. Thus the animal-worship of Egypt was probably a survival of the old faith in totems, differing among different clans, which was so firmly rooted in the popular traditions, that the

actually occurred; and they must be relegated to the same place as the corresponding myths of the creation of the animal world and of the universe. They are neither more or less credible than the

sly existing population. This is the more remarkable as the name of Accad and the form of the oldest Accadian hieroglyphics make it almost certain that they had migrated into Mesopotamia from the highlands of Kurdistan or of Central Asia. The Athenians also and other Greek tribes all claimed to be autochthonous, and their legends of men springing from the stones of Deucalion, and from the dragon's teeth of Cadmus, all point in the same direction. The great Aryan races also have no trustworthy traditions of any ancient migrations from Asia into Europe, or vice versa, and their languages seem to denote a common residence during the formation of the different dialects in those regions of Northern Europe and Southern Russia in which we find them living when we first catch sight of them. The only exception to

highly artificial and complicated calculation of Chald?an astrology, has been already referred to as a striking instance of the wide diffusion of astronomical myths in very early times. Many of the most popular nursery tales also, such as Jack the Giant-kill

fords the most immediate and crucial test of the claim of the Bible to be taken as a literally true and inspired account, not only of matters of moral and religious import, but of all the histor

l Holy Scripture as originally given. To us the Bible does

rgymen of the Church of England have put

ch in the original languages. We believe that they are inspired by the Holy Ghost; that they are what they profess to be; that they mean what they say; and tha

ns. There can be no question that if the words of the Old Testament are "literally inspired," and "mean what they say," they oppose an inflexible non possumus to all the most certain discoveries of Astronomy, Geology, Zoology, Biology, Egypt

the assumption that the inspired writers do not "mean what they say," but something entirely different. If they say "days," they mean geological periods of which no reader had the remotest conception until the present century. If they say that light was made before the sun, and the earth before the sun, moon, and stars, they really mean, in some unexplained way, to indicate Newton's law of gravity, Laplace's nebular theory, and the discoveries of the spectroscope. By using words therefore in a non-natural sense, and surrounding them with a halo of mystical and misty eloquence, they evade bringing the pleadings to a distinct and definite issue such as the popular mind

therefore, approximately about 2200 b.c., and that of the Deluge about 2500 b.c. The Septuagint version assigns 700 years more than that of the Hebrew Bible for the interval between Abraham and Noah; but this is only done by increasing the already fabulous age of the patriarchs. Accepting, however, this Septuagint version, though it has been constantly repudiated by the Jews themselves, and by nearly all Christian authorities from St. Jerome down to Archbishop Usher, the date of the Deluge cannot be carried further back than to about 3000 b.c., a date at least 1000, and more probably 2000, years later than that shown by the records and monuments of Egy

ied that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon earth, and every man." And again: "Every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both men and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven, and they were destroyed from the earth; and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in

contained in one of the most important chapters in the history of the relations of man to God. In this view it is a still more signal instance than the fall of Adam, of God's displeasure with sin and its disastrous consequences, of his justice and mercy in sparing the innocent and rewarding righteousness; it establishes a new departure for the human race, a new distinction between the chosen people of Israel and the accursed Canaanites, based

is simply water raised from the seas by evaporation, and is returned to them by rivers. It does not add a single drop of water to that already existing on the earth and in its atmosphere. The heaviest rains do nothing but swell rivers and inundate the adjacent flat lands to a depth of a few feet, which rapidly subsides. The only escape from this law of nature is to suppose some sudden convulsion, such as a change in the position of the earth's axis of rotation, by which the existing waters of the earth were drained in some latitudes and heaped up in others. But any such local accumulation of water implies a sudden and violent rush to heap it up in forty days, and an equally violent rush to run it down to its old level when the disturbing cause ceased, as it must have done in 150 day

s of sand and silt, containing often delicate fluviatile shells, which were deposited when the stream ran tranquilly, as the coarser gravels were when it ran with a stronger torrent. And the gravels of adjacent valleys, even when separated by a low water-shed, are not intermixed, but each composed of the débris of its own system of drainage, by which small rivers like the Somme and the Avon have, in the course of ages, scooped out their present valleys to an extent of more than 100 feet in depth and two miles in width. Masses of loose sand, volcanic ashes, and other incoherent materials o

very "living substance was destroyed that was upon the face of the ground," except the pairs preserved in the Ark. It is a question, therefore, not of one pair of bears, but of many-polar, grizzly, brown, and all the varieties, down to the pigmy bear of Sumatra. So of cattle: there must have been not only pairs of the wild and domestic species of Europe, but of the gaur of India, the Brahmin bull, the yak, the musk-ox, and of all the many species of buffaloes and bisons. If we take the larger animals only, there must have been several pairs of elephants, rhinoceroses, camels, horses, oxen, buffaloes, elk, deer and antelopes, apes, zebras, and innumerable others of th

will soon find that the bulk required for food is far greater than that of the animals. And what did the birds and creeping things feed upon? Were there rats and mice for the owls, gnats for the swallows, worms and butterflies for the thrushes, and generally a supply of insects for the lizar

int of fact it is divided into distinct zoological provinces. The fauna of Australia, for instance, is totally different from that of Europe, Asia, and Ame

ies of the human race have descended from one common ancestor, Noah, who lived not more than 5000 years ago. Consider the vast variety and diversity of human races existing now, and in some of the most typical instances shown by Egyptian and Chald?an monuments to have existed before Noah was born-the black and woolly-haired Negroes, the yellow Mongolians, the Australians, the Negritos, the Hottentots, the pygmies of Stanley's African forest, the Esquimaux, t

tly authentic historical records, confirmed by monuments, extending in Egypt to a date certainly 2000 ye

such that anything approaching an universal deluge must have destroyed all traces of civilization, and buried the country thousands of feet under a deep ocean. Even a very great local inundation must have spread devastation far and wide and been a memorable event in all subsequent annals. When remarkable natural events, such as earthquakes, did occur, they are mentioned in the annals of the reigning king, but

d have occurred in the valleys of the Nile or Euphrates without leaving unmistakable traces of its passage w

und among so many different races often so widely separated. There are

on of destructi

of marine shells on

on of solar myths l

the other year was said to have destroyed half a million of people, or the hurricane wave which swept over the Sunderbunds, must have left an impression which, among isolated and illiterate people, might r

torical events fades away with surprising rapidity when it is not preserved by written records. If, as Xenophon records, all memory of the great city of Nineveh had disappea

ico has often been referred to as a confirmation of the Noachian flood. But when looked into, it appears that this Mexican deluge was only a part of their mythical cosmogony which told of four successive destructions and renovations of the

ven rise to speculations as to deluges. At the very beginning of history, Egyptian and Chald?an astronomers were sufficiently advanced in science to wish to account for such phenomena, and to argue that where sea-shells were found the sea must once have been. Many of the deluge-myths of antiquity, such as that of Deu

of the very ancient Chald?an astronomical myths of the passage of the sun through the signs of the zodiac. This is clearly the case in the Hin

s poem was obviously based on an astronomical myth. It was in twelve chapters, dedicated to the sun's passage through the twelve signs of the zodiac. The adventures of Izdubar, like those of Heracles, have obvious reference to

a fabulous antiquity. It has every appearance of being a myth to commemorate the sun's passage through the rainy sign of Aquarius, just as the contests of Izdubar and Heracles with Leo, Taurus, Draco, Sagittarius, etc.

h, the Semitic translation of the Accadian god who presided over the realm of water, and navigated the bark or ark of the sun across it, when returning from its setting in the west to its rising in the east. The chief difference is the same as in the Chald?an and Biblical cosmogonies of the creation of the universe-viz. that the former is Polytheistic, and the latter Monotheistic. Where the former talks of Bel, Ea, and Istar, the latter attributes everything to Jehovah or Elohim. Thus

the Deluge and of the voyage is shortened from a year to a little more than a month; more human beings are saved, as Hasisadra takes on board not his own family only, but several of his friends and relations; and the difficulty of repeopling the earth from a single centre is diminished by throwing the date of the Deluge back to an immense and mythical antiquity.

t or about the date when the first mention is made of such a book as being discovered in the Temple in the reign of Josiah. Kuenen, Wellhausen, and other leading authorities place the date of the Elohistic and Jehovistic narratives, which include the Creation and Deluge, even later; and, if not compiled during or after the Babylonian Captivity, they were certainly revised, and ha

not be carried back beyond 3100 or 3200 b.c., while a practically identical account of the same event is given, as a legendary episode of fabulous antiquity, in an epic poem, based on a solar myth, which was certainly reduced to writing many centuries before the earliest possible date of the Scriptural Deluge. It is a

e issue is one upon which any unprejudiced mind of ordinary intelligence and information can arrive at a conclusive verdict. If there never was an universal Deluge within historical times; if the highest mountains were never covered; if all life was never destroyed, except the contents of the Ark; if the whole animal creation, including beasts, birds, and creeping things, never lived together

at the Bible has clearly been an important factor in this evolution of the human race; that it consists of two portions-one of moral and religious import, the other of scientific statements and theories, relating to such matters of purely human reason as astronomy, geology, literary criticism, and ancient history; and that these two parts are essentially different. It is quite conceivable that, on the hypothesis of a Divine Creator, one step in the majestic evolution from the original impress should have been that men of genius and devout nature should write books contai

all of the Bible must be inspired or none, remind me of the king who said that, if God had only consulted him in his scheme of creation, he could have saved him from a good many mistakes. It is not difficult to understand how, even if we assume the theory of inspiration, or of original impress, for the religious portion of the Bible, the other or scientific portion should have been purposely left open to all the erro

the human mind from lower to higher things. Above all, it is a record of the preparation of the soil, in a peculiar race, for Christianity, which has been and is such an important factor in the history of the foremost races and highest civilizations. With all the errors and absurdities, all the crimes and cruelties which have attached themselves to it,