prepares the mysterious caldron which shadows out the awful catastrophe
of the Deluge." (Faber's "Pagan Idolatry," vol. ii., pp. 150, 151.) In
the first Avatar of Vishnu we are told that "the divine ordinances were
stolen by the demon Haya-Griva. Vishnu became a fish; and after the
Deluge, when the waters had subsided, he recovered the holy books from
the bottom of the ocean." Berosus, speaking of the time before the
Deluge, says: "Oannes wrote concerning the generations of mankind and
their civil polity." The Hebrew commentators on Genesis say, "Our
rabbins assert that Adam, our father of blessed memory, composed a book
of precepts, which were delivered to him by God in Paradise." (Smith's
"Sacred Annals," p. 49.) That is to say, the Hebrews preserved a
tradition that the Ad-ami, the people of Ad, or Adlantis, possessed,
while yet dwelling in Paradise, the art of writing. It has been
suggested that without the use of letters it would have been impossible
to preserve the many details as to dates, ages, and measurements, as of
the ark, handed down to us in Genesis. Josephus, quoting Jewish
traditions, says, "The births and deaths of illustrious men, between
Adam and Noah, were noted down at the time with great accuracy." (Ant.,
lib. 1, cap. iii., see. 3.) Suidas, a Greek lexicographer of the
eleventh century, expresses tradition when he says, "Adam was the author
of arts and letters." The Egyptians said that their god Anubis was an
antediluvian, and it "wrote annals before the Flood." The Chinese have
traditions that the earliest race of their nation, prior to history,
"taught all the arts of life and wrote books." "The Goths always had the
use of letters;" and Le Grand affirms that before or soon after the
Flood "there were found the acts of great men engraved in letters on
large stones." (Fosbroke's "Encyclopaedia of Antiquity," vol. i., p.
355.) Pliny says, "Letters were always in use." Strabo says, "The
inhabitants of Spain possessed records written before the Deluge."
(Jackson's "Chronicles of Antiquity," vol. iii., p. 85.) Mitford