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
was a worker in iron.
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