According to the earliest traditions, the remote progenitors of the
race had once tenanted a world above the surface of that in which their
descendants dwelt. Myths of that world were still preserved in their
archives, and in those myths were legends of a vaulted dome in which the
lamps were lighted by no human hand. But such legends were considered by
most commentators as allegorical fables. According to these traditions
the earth itself, at the date to which the traditions ascend, was not
indeed in its infancy, but in the throes and travail of transition
from one form of development to another, and subject to many violent
revolutions of nature. By one of such revolutions, that portion of the
upper world inhabited by the ancestors of this race had been subjected
to inundations, not rapid, but gradual and uncontrollable, in which all,
save a scanty remnant, were submerged and perished. Whether this be
a record of our historical and sacred Deluge, or of some earlier one
contended for by geologists, I do not pretend to conjecture; though,
according to the chronology of this people as compared with that of
Newton, it must have been many thousands of years before the time of
Noah. On the other hand, the account of these writers does not harmonise
with the opinions most in vogue among geological authorities, inasmuch
as it places the existence of a human race upon earth at dates long
anterior to that assigned to the terrestrial formation adapted to the
introduction of mammalia. A band of the ill-fated race, thus invaded by
the Flood, had, during the march of the waters, taken refuge in caverns
amidst the loftier rocks, and, wandering through these hollows, they
lost sight of the upper world forever. Indeed, the whole face of the
earth had been changed by this great revulsion; land had been turned
into sea--sea into land. In the bowels of the inner earth, even now,
I was informed as a positive fact, might be discovered the remains of
human habitation--habitation not in huts and caverns, but in vast cities
whose ruins attest the civilisation of races which flourished before