In the first place, there can now be no doubt that the order of creation, as revealed to the author of the first chapter of Genesis, corresponds with the results of astronomical and geological research in a manner which cannot be accidental.[30] This old document thus stands in the position of a prophecy which has been fulfilled in its details. Besides this, the discovery of the similar though not identical Chaldean creation tablets throws a remarkable and interesting side-light on the whole question. The Chaldean tablets are unquestionably very ancient, and borrowed from still older documents from which they are alleged to have been copied. But they and the Genesis narrative are independent of each other. Neither can have been copied from the other. Thus there must have been a still more ancient common source of the narrative, and, as I have elsewhere urged,[31] the greater simplicity and monotheistic character of the Hebrew document entitle it to the palm of the higher antiquity. [30] For evidence of this I may be permitted to refer to my work, _The Origin of the World_. [31] _Modern Science in Bible Lands._ With reference to the antediluvian age and the Deluge, while the Bible is here only in accord with almost universal tradition, and this in reference to an event which if it occurred at all must have fixed itself in the memory of the survivors, it is in remarkable accordance with very ancient Chaldean writings commemorative of the same event. Some principal points of this accordance are the following. The Chaldean account implies that the anger of the gods, or some of them, against an evil race of men was the cause of the catastrophe. It gives it a universal character, so far as the sphere of observation extended. It represents the survivors as saved in a ship or ark. It represents Hasisadra, its Noah, as sending out birds to ascertain the subsidence of the waters. In all these points and many others the Chaldean account agrees with the Biblical in representing antediluvian men, or some of them, as civilised, possessing domestic animals, and competent to construct large ships.