It was mentioned in Eimeo," and in a diffuser shape LETTER in Raiatea.43 42 The tradition of Eimeo states, that after the inundation of the land, when the water subsided, a man landed from a canoe near Tiataepua, in their island, and erected a marae or altar in honor of his God. Ellis, Polyn. v. ii. p. 57. 43 This also makes their Neptune Ruahahi to have been caught by a fisherman's hook, as he was sleeping in the coralline groves of the ocean, shortly after the first peopling of the world. He declared the land was criminal, and should be destroyed. The man implored his forgiveness, and was ordered to go to a small island, while the others were destroyed. Some say he took a friend, with a dog, a pig and a pair of fowls. The waters rose. The inhabitants fled to the mountains; these were then covered, and all perished but the fisherman and his company, who, as the waters retired, took up their abode on the main island, and became the progenitors of the present inhabitants. Their belief of this is unshaken. Ellis, p. 59. XVII. XVIII. LETTER XVIII. SUMMARY VIEW OF THE EVIDENCE WHICH THE RECAPITULATED APPEARANCES. MY DEAR SON, LETTER HAVING perused these testimonial traditions from both ancient and modern times, and from all quarters of the globe, let us fairly and dispassionately ask ourselves,--not what we may choose or like to believe or to disbelieve, but what is the right and rational conclusion to which they should lead us, as men seeking for truth; valuing only what is true and real, and desirous to avoid all fallacies and prepossessions. We observe, as we peruse them, a singular diversity of circumstances. This is an advantage to us in an inquiry into the certainty of the great event we are investigating; for these differences and peculiarities satisfy us, that they are not copies from each other, as all uniformity may be. It is always possible that the exactly similar may be borrowed from what is so, but wherever variation begins, this possibility diminishes. The diminution increases with the difference; and when the discrepancies become so great as those of India and North and South America are found to be, on comparing them with the accounts of antiquity and the ideas of the classical nations, the possibility of a copy ceases, and changes into that character which we denominate by the contrary term. XVIII. Convinced from this consideration that we have LETTER before us a large collection of independent traditions, what is the impartial judgment which our reasoning mind, according to its usual laws and operations in all our other researches and transactions, should and will naturally form on this subject? Is it possible for us, without forcing our reason out of its natural bias and tendency, on such evidence, to avoid concluding that there has been a general deluge, overwhelming the earth and that population upon it which preceded our present race? If the question was, whether there has been an invasion and destruction of Troy; or whether Alexander the Great subdued the Persian empire, or whether Cyrus established it, should we hesitate one instant in accrediting either of these events and all of them, on such a concurrence of testimony; and should we not rather wonder at the mind that under any other feelings or influences should persist in denying them? We have certainly no right to depreciate each other for entertaining contrary opinions to ourselves. This would be unreasonable, and an infringement of that benign and mutually respecting feeling with which all fellow creatures should regard each other. My meaning is not, therefore, either to encourage self-opinion in ourselves or unbecoming notions of others, but simply to ask, if it would not be a rational deduction as to ourselves, that if we were to reject any of the great facts of history which came to our knowlege, with the confirming support of such a combination of traditions as attend the incident of the deluge, we should be judging on some impulses or impressions, different from the desire to know the real truth on the investigated subject? XVIII. LETTER This deduction is warranted by the experience, that those who have acted with any analogy to this mode of conduct, have either been defective in their judging capacity, or have been wilfully supporting an extravagant conjecture for some personal purpose of their self-interest or self-love. The Père Hardouin's assertion that all our classics were forgeries; Volney's idea that our Saviour and his Apostles were but the sun and the twelve signs of the zodiac; the declaration and belief of one of our contemporaries that the Grecian paganism and the divinities are the true deities and religion which we should adopt; De Maillet's idea that men have sprung from fishes,' and many such like dreams which might be enumerated,' are instances of individual peculiarities, in which mind may be thought to be acting in contradiction to reason and to evidence, without any personal injustice or affront to the defenders of such imaginations. But the truth is, that no right mind, which is not acting under prepossessions, that turn it from the simple desire of calmly discerning what is true or most probable, has ever differed from the general sense, on the main outlines of the history of the world. A few have deviated so far into singularity as to call in question the Trojan war; but altho this 'He maintained this wild idea in his Telliamed, published in 1748. Cuvier thus notices it: De Maillet covered the whole globe with water for thousands of years. All terrestrial animals had been originally marine. Man himself was at first a fish; and the author assures his readers, that it is not uncommon to find in the ocean, fishes which have not only become half-men, but which will some day become entire human beings.' Cuvier, Fossil Bones, v. i. p. 41. 2 In this very year, 1834, I find an English traveller maintaining that animals grow up out of the carth!! XVIII. has nothing like such collateral corroborations as the LETTER occurrence of the deluge, yet the doubt and ingenuity of its impugners have not shaken the general impression of its reality, and have the effect of seeming to be only a favourite chimera, a mental football, or a too hasty adoption of its supporters. If such be our impressions as to the grand transactions of mankind, notwithstanding the minor amount of evidence on which their memorial rests: and if we act on the same intellectual principles in considering the traditional testimonies of the deluge, it appears to me that the lover and student of historical truth, who allows nothing but the desire of ascertaining the reality of the fact to guide him, as far as at this late age of the world he can now discover it, can but form one conclusion on the topic we are considering; and this will be, that there has been such a general catastrophe, before the present generations of mankind spread over the present surface of the earth. For in these facts, that the earth was so overflooded, that the anterior race perished as the waters prevailed, and that from a small surviving or preserved fragment, the human kind were renewed into the tribes and nations who have since been on the globe, all the historical and traditional accounts which have been cited coincide and agree. They all state or imply these main incidents, which are the substantial points of knowlege, which this subject requires us to entertain. It is, however, important to remark, that several of them, very remote from each other,-Assyrian, Grecian, Roman, Sanscrit, South American and the Polynesian Islands,-nations, some of which could have had no communication with each other, also |