real surrender of the historical character of Noah's deluge
under cover of the smoke of a great discharge of
pseudoscientific artillery. They seem to imagine that the proofs
which abound in all parts of the world, of large oscillations of
the relative level of land and sea, combined with the
probability that, when the sea-level was rising, sudden
incursions of the sea like that which broke in over Holland and
formed the Zuyder Zee, may have often occurred, can be made to
look like evidence that something that, by courtesy, might be
called a general Deluge has really taken place. Their discursive
energy drags misunderstood truth into their service; and "the
glacial epoch" is as sure to crop up among them as King
Charles's head in a famous memorial--with about as much
appropriateness. The old story of the raised beach on Moel
Tryfaen is trotted out; though, even if the facts are as yet
rightly interpreted, there is not a shadow of evidence that the
change of sea-level in that locality was sudden, or that glacial
Welshmen would have known it was taking place.<10> Surely it is
difficult to perceive the relevancy of bringing in something
that happened in the glacial epoch (if it did happen) to account
for the tradition of a flood in the Euphrates valley between
2000 and 3000 B.C. But the date of the Noachian flood is solidly
fixed by the sole authority for it; no shuffling of the
chronological data will carry it so far back as 3000 B.C.;
and the Hebrew epos agrees with the Chaldaean in placing it
after the development of a somewhat advanced civilisation.
The only authority for the Noachian deluge assures us that,
before it visited the earth, Cain had built cities; Jubal had
invented harps and organs; while mankind had advanced so far
beyond the neolithic, nay even the bronze, stage that Tubal-cain