universal tradition among all branches of the human race, with the one
exception, however, of the black. Now, a recollection thus precise and
concordant cannot be a myth voluntarily invented. No religious or
cosmogonic myth presents this character of universality. It must arise
from the reminiscence of a real and terrible event, so powerfully
impressing the imagination of the first ancestors of our race as never
to have been forgotten by their descendants. This cataclysm must have
occurred near the first cradle of mankind, and before the dispersion of
the families from which the principal races were to spring; for it would
be at once improbable and uncritical to admit that, at as many different
points of the globe as we should have to assume in order to explain the
wide spread of these traditions, local phenomena so exactly alike should
have occurred, their memory having assumed an identical form, and
presenting circumstances that need not necessarily have occurred to the
mind in such cases.

"Let us observe, however, that probably the diluvian tradition is not
primitive, but imported in America; that it undoubtedly wears the aspect
of an importation among the rare populations of the yellow race where it
is found; and lastly, that it is doubtful among the Polynesians of
Oceania. There will still remain three great races to which it is
undoubtedly peculiar, who have not borrowed it from each other, but
among whom the tradition is primitive, and goes back to the most ancient
times, and these three races are precisely the only ones of which the
Bible speaks as being descended from Noah--those of which it gives the
ethnic filiation in the tenth chapter of Genesis. This observation.
which I hold to be undeniable, attaches a singularly historic and exact
value to the tradition as recorded by the Sacred Book, even if, on the
other hand, it may lead to giving it a more limited geographical and
ethnological significance. . . .