The surviving samples of these alleged works are not calculated to make one regret anything about the deluge so much as its failure to be more thorough. Take e.g. Adam’s poems on the creation of Eve. Imagine Noah’s sons, “In the Springtime, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thought of love”, drawing out a tablet or two of this poem for inspiration and reading how calmly the new bride is invited by Adam to “shake hands and kiss him”! The efforts to date the library of Adam have been various. A _terminus ad quem_ is offered by Berosus, who asserts that the capital of the world before the Flood was named “The Library” or the “Book All”. He puts this at 250,000 years B.C., but this of course implies considerable development between Adam and the time when the world was populous enough to need a capital at all. There is, therefore, no necessary conflict between the veracious Berosus and the veracious modern historians of science, who place the _terminus a quo_ at sixty million years ago. There is, however, considerable discrepancy between even the later of these two on the one hand and the very earliest of the one hundred and forty different dates between 3483 and 6984 B.C. actually assigned by more timid historians of the beginnings of Adamic civilization. As sober historians are bound to confess that at best the historical evidence for some 243,016 years on the one hand and 59,748,087 or so years on the other of Berosus’ date is not wholly continuous and 6984 B.C. may be regarded as about the earliest exact date known to have been ventured for Adamite libraries. It hardly needs to be added that all these alleged patriarchal books and libraries are apocryphal although many of them have a respectable antiquity of more than two thousand years and most of them belong either to pre-Christian, early Christian or Mohammedan times. They have been by no means without their influence on human thought and on the actions of those who believed their statements to be historical truth. They are therefore not to be ignored in reckoning the influences which have shaped library development. § 10. _Prehistoric and historic libraries_ Leaving aside, however, all kinds of imaginary libraries, mythological, fabulous, legendary or apocryphal, we still have for real human libraries a very respectable historical and prehistorical antiquity. This long period may be divided into prehistoric and historic or beginnings and later history—the prehistoric period or period of beginnings being understood to be the time before chronological record by years, or before the time of abundant and decipherable hand-written records.