countless others, point to the application of one or the other, or of both these explanations.[167-2] In them the early thinkers found some rest: but not for long. The perplexity of the presence of this immediate order of things seemed solved; but another kept obtruding itself: what was going on before that “beginning?” Vain to stifle the inquiry by replying, “nothing.”[168-1] For time, which knows no beginning, was there, still building, still destroying; nothing can be put to it, nor anything taken from it. What then is left but the conclusion of the Preacher: “That which hath been, is now; and that which is to be, hath already been?” Regarding time as a form of force, the only possible history of the material universe is that it is a series of destructions and restorations, force latent evolving into force active or energy, and this dissipated and absorbed again into latency. Expressed in myths, these destructions and restorations are the Epochs of Nature. They are an essential part of the religious traditions of the Brahmans, Persians, Parsees, Greeks, Egyptians, Jews, Mexicans, Mayas, and of all nations who have reached a certain stage of culture. The length of the intervening periods may widely differ. The kalpa or great year of the Brahmans is so long that were a cube of granite a hundred yards each way brushed once in a century by a soft cloth, it would be quite worn to dust before the kalpa would close: or, as some Christians believe, there may be but six thousand years, six days of God in whose sight “a thousand years are as one day,” between the creation and the cremation of the world, from when it rose from the waters until it shall be consumed by the fire. There were also various views about the agents and the completeness of these periodical destructions. In the Norse mythology and in the doctrine of Buddhism, not one of the gods can survive the fire of the last day. Among the Greeks, great Jove alone will await the appearance of the virgin world after the icy winter and the fiery summer of the Great Year. The Brahmans hold that the higher classes of gods outlive the wreck of things which, at the close of the day of Brahm, involves all men and many divinities in elemental chaos; while elsewhere, in the later Puranas and in the myths of Mexico, Peru, and Assyria, one or a few of the race of man escape a deluge which is universal, and serve to people the new-made earth. This latter supposition, in its application to the last epoch of nature, is the origin of the myth of the Flood.