In the succession of ages we have in outline the history of mankind in the ante-diluvian period--the Fall, _supra_--followed in the succeeding age by a great _drought_--[compare this tradition with the following passage in Fran. Lenormant's "Histoire Ancienne," i. p. 5, 2d ed., Paris 1868--"and when geology shows us the first ante-diluvian men who came into our part of the world, living in the midst of ice, under conditions of climate analogous to those under which the Esquimaux live at the present day ... one is naturally brought to the recollection of _that ancient tradition of the Persians_, fully conformable to the information which the Bible supplies on the subject of the fall of man, ... which ranks among the first of the chastisements which followed the fall, along with death and other calamities, the advent of an _intense and permanent cold_ which man could scarcely endure, and which rendered the earth almost uninhabitable."[106]] It is to this period, and the short period immediately following the Deluge (_vide_ ch. ii. p. 21, and _infra_, pp. 136, 137), that I am inclined to trace the notions of a primitive barbarism--compare, for instance, the facts which Goguet, in his "Origin of Laws," i. p. 72, adduces in proof of his progress from barbarism, with the above tradition of the Persians recorded by Lenormant. [106] Is not this the meaning of the cxlvii. psalm, in the expression, "ante faciem frigoris ejus quis sustinebit"? Does not the psalm recount to the Jewish people, in rapid allusions, all that God had done for them, in contrast to the chastisements that had befallen other nations; and if it is objected that there is no allusion to the Deluge, unless in its indirect and beneficial influences, in the words, "flavit spiritus ejus et fluent aquæ," I reply that to the survivors, the Deluge, regarded largely, and in its permanent effects, was no calamity, but the commencement of a new and more favoured era. Goguet says--"The Egyptians, Persians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and several other nations (_vide_ his references, p. 72), acknowledged that their ancestors were once without the use of fire. The Chinese confess the same of their progenitors.... Pomponius, Mela, Pliny, Plutarch, and other ancient authors speak of nations, who, at the time they wrote, knew not the use of fire, or had only just learned it. Facts of the same kind are attested by several modern relations." Let this latter statement be compared with _infra_, pp. 136, 137 .