After this he sends his fatal present, Pandora, to Epimetheus.(611) Hesiod calls this present of the _first woman_ “a fatal gift.” It was a punishment, he explains, sent to man “for the theft of [divine creative] fire.” Her apparition on Earth is the signal for every kind of evil. Before her appearance, the human races lived happy, exempt from sickness and suffering—as the same races are made to live under Yima’s rule, in the Mazdean _Vendidâd_. Two Deluges may also be traced, in universal tradition, by carefully comparing Hesiod, the _Rig Veda_, the _Zend Avesta_, etc., but no _first_ man is ever mentioned in any of the Theogonies save in the _Bible_.(612) Everywhere the man of _our_ Race appears after a cataclysm of water. After this, tradition mentions only the several designations of continents and islands which sink under the ocean waves in due time.(613) Gods and mortals have one common origin according to Hesiod;(614) and Pindar echoes the statement.(615) Deucalion and Pyrrha, who escape the Deluge by constructing an Ark like Noah’s,(616) ask Jupiter to reänimate the human race whom he had made to perish under the waters of the Flood. In the Slavonian mythology all men are drowned, and two old people, a man and his wife, alone remain. Then Pram’zimas, the “master of all,” advises them to jump seven times on the rocks of the Earth, and seven new races (couples) are born, from which come the nine Lithuanian tribes.(617) As well understood by the author of _Mythologie de la Grèce Antique_—the Four Ages signify periods of time, and are also an allegorical allusion to the Races. As he says: The successive races, destroyed and replaced by others, without any period of transition, are characterized in Greece by the name of metals, to express their ever‐decreasing value. Gold, the most brilliant and precious of all, symbol of brightness ... qualifies the first race.... The men of the second race, those of the Age of Silver, are already far inferior to the first. Inert and weak creatures, all their life is no better than a long and stupid infancy.... They disappear.... The men of the Age of Bronze are robust and violent [the Third Race]; ... their strength is extreme. “They had arms made of bronze, habitations of bronze; used nought but bronze. Iron, the black metal, was yet unknown.”(618) The fourth race is, with Hesiod, that of the heroes who fell before Thebes,(619) or under the walls of Troy.(620)