But it is useless to dwell on the story of a universal deluge of water. It is in the light of modern science physically impossible and absurd; and such men as Buckland, Pye Smith, Hugh Miller, and Hitchcock, with many other distinguished Christian scientists, give up the doctrine of a universal deluge while claiming a partial one. And here, again, the ancient astronomy comes in with an explanation of partial floods of waters by the natural results of the “precession of the equinoxes,” in which, at certain periods during the change of the polar axis of the earth, great physical convulsions must follow, with wide eruptions of water, making a partial overflow and suggesting the idea of a universal deluge. Four such cataclysms must have occurred while the sun was making one journey through the twelve zodiacal constellations. Prof. Huxley has recently well said: “But the voice of archæology and historical criticism still has to be heard, and it gives forth no uncertain sound. The marvellous recovery of the records of an antiquity far superior to any that can be ascribed to the Pentateuch, which has been effected by the decipherers of cuneiform characters, has put us in possession of a series once more, not of speculations, but of facts, which has a most remarkable bearing upon the question of the trustworthiness of the narrative of the Flood. It is established that for centuries before the asserted migration of Terah from Ur of the Chaldees (which, according to the orthodox interpreters of the Pentateuch, took place after the year 2000 b. c.) Lower Mesopotamia was the seat of a civilization in which art and science and literature had attained a development formerly unsuspected, or, if there were faint reports of it, treated as fabulous. And it is also no matter of speculation, but a fact, that the libraries of this people contain versions of a long epic poem, one of the twelve books of which tells the story of a deluge which in a number of its leading features corresponds to the story attributed to Berosus, no less than with the story given in Genesis, with curious exactnesss. “Looking at the convergence of all these lines of evidence leads to the one conclusion—that the story of the Flood in Genesis is merely a version of one of the oldest pieces of purely fictitious literature extant; that whether this is or is not its origin, the events asserted in it to have taken place assuredly never did take place; further, that in point of fact the story in the plain and logically necessary sense of its words has long since been given up by orthodox and conservative commentators of the Established Church.” The only rational interpretation of the extraordinary stories of the Pentateuch and other scriptures is to regard them as mythical and allegorical, borrowed from the astrological systems of more ancient peoples. It is very difficult to present within the limits here allowed what has grown into ponderous volumes in elucidating the matter in hand.