from alluding to it. We need not ask whether any sincere Christian, but whether any honest man, would for a moment justify us in shunning an enquiry that has not been willingly entered into, and that could not with propriety have been avoided. Shall the Hindoo say to us, "you have come from the uttermost parts of the earth to try our traditions by a test, which you dare not apply to your own"?

Until the facts mentioned in p. 23 attracted my attention, I had never entertained any doubts as to our narrative being in all its details of an historical character. The points that have arisen, and which have hitherto escaped observation, must necessarily have forced themselves upon my notice, if no question had ever been raised on the subject, and if the incidents of that event had come down to us divested of all those difficulties that have suggested themselves to geologists and to matter-of-fact logicians.

These investigations into the calendars and festivals of nations were commenced partly as an amusement, and partly as being likely to lead to important results as respects ethnology. During the past nine years the subject of the Deluge did not appear to be connected with these researches, or was avoided as not being an inviting or necessary branch of enquiry.

As I am not qualified by my tastes or by my studies for theological controversies, I must leave this important question to Divines, and to those more worthy or more competent to discuss it than myself; and I am only too happy to refer them to Sir William Jones, Bryant and Greswell, as far more reliable authorities on the subject than myself. My inferences were arrived at by a tedious comparison of calendars, festivals, symbols and traditions; while those eminent authors lead us to conclusions, some of which being based on chronology, are the more important, as they can be reduced to a simple matter of arithmetical calculation.

The only portion of the paper on the Festival of the Dead to which I would invite attention respecting this subject is that (p. 103) in which it is attempted to be shown that these investigations suggest a new explanation for the difficulties in our narrative, and lead us to infer that it embodied primitive traditions in language in accordance with the remarkable peculiarities of the age in which it was written; and that it was intended and understood to be partly a memorial of the Flood, and partly a record of a great philosophical truth that was a heritage from primeval man. This truth, it is clear, must have been a gift from the Deity to our first parents, a gift by which the beneficent design of the Creator, that "the lights in the firmament of the heaven" should be for "signs and for seasons and for days and years," was accomplished,

from the very hour when creation gave birth to time and to humanity. The divine origin of this heritage must have been long treasured up in the memory of men. The sacred Tau of the Egyptians, always placed in the hands of their divinities, was regarded as "one of the greatest gifts bestowed by the Deity on man." This symbol, I have endeavored to show,2 was the emblem of the primeval calendar, which still exists in the Southern Hemisphere, as the year of the Tau or of the Matarii (the Pleiades). But unlike the Hebrews, the heathen nations of old appear to have turned the blessing into a curse, and to have confounded the gift with the giver; and thus Time or the Year converted into a God, and concealed from the eyes of men in a veil of mystery, became the fruitful parent of many Deities.3

2

See extracts from Greswell, p. 41; also note to p. 91.

See note, p. 96

"It will not be amiss to mention here a fact that has hitherto escaped my notice, which confirms the view that the Festival of the Dead was regulated by the Pleiades. It would appear that the ancients combined with their worship of Time or the Year, their superstitious veneration for deceased ancestors. Hence the commemoration of the dead became a new year's festival, and the Pleiades were regarded as the Stars of Death or of the god of the dead. It has been conjectured by me, that the Seven Cabiri, whose mysteries were so venerated by ancient nations,. were the seven Pleiades, and that their name, like that of the Cabaries of Madagascar, and of the Australian corroborees, was derived from the Samang word kabis (death).

Crawford, in his work on the Indian Archipelago (II. p. 142), gives a vocabulary of 18 dialects, which, he says, belong in common with those found throughout the Pacific Islands, to the great Polynesian language. On examining it we find that the word for death, which in one instance is kabis, in 10 out of the 18 dialects selected, occurs as mati, mate, matai, or mortê. We can hardly doubt that Matarii is synonymous with Cabiri, and that both mean the Stars of Death. The significance of the Polynesian name for the Pleiades, Matarii, will be more apparent if we substitute for matai the word mortê, and call them the Mortérii. See note on p. 28; also pp. 61, 44, 72, 93, 111, 121.

It may also be well to explain a point to which I have not hitherto referred, respecting our history of the Deluge. I have assumed that the year indicated by it consisted of months of 30 days each, as the interval between the 17th day of the 2nd month, and the 17th day of the 7th is apparently described as 150 days. If the term "yet other seven days" in v. 10 has the meaning which some commentators assign to it, it supplies an additional proof of the astronomical nature of the narrative; as we find that the first occasion, when the dove was sent forth, was on the 17th day of the 11th month; the second (when it returned with the olive leaf or branch) was on the 21st of August, when the Pleiades culminate at sunrise; and the third, when it finally left the ark, was on the 28th of August, which was the last day of the Egyptian year, and among the ancient Romans was a conspicuous anniversary, as it still is among the Chinese and Japanese. The chronological evidence, however, to which I have referred, is much more satisfactory than the inferences derived from calendars, which must be more or less the subject of conjecture, or at least of doubt and discussion. The subject touched upon here is alluded to in on p. 60 and fall.