There seems to exist no such definite outline of the Egyptian tradition referred to by Josephus as that preserved of the Chaldean one. Plato, In his "Timæus," makes the Egyptian priest whom he introduces as discoursing with Solon, to attribute that clear recollection of a remote antiquity which survived in Egypt, to its comparative freedom from those great floods which had at various times desolated Greece, and destroyed the memory of remote events by the destruction of the people and their records; and Bacon had evidently this passage in view when he poetically remarked, in his magnificent essay on the "Vicissitude of Things," that "the great winding sheets that bury all things in oblivion are two,--deluges and earthquakes; from which two destructions is to be noted," he adds, "that the remnant of people that happen to be preserved are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past." Even in Egypt, however, the recollection of the deluge seems to have survived, though it lay entangled amid what seem to be symbolized memories of unusual floodings of the river Nile. "The Noah of Egypt," says Professor Hitchcock, in his singularly ingenious essay (Historical and Geological Deluges Compared), "appears to have been Osiris. Typhon, a personification of the ocean, enticed him into an ark, which, being closed, he was forced to sea; and it was a curious fact, that he embarked on the seventeenth day of the month Athyr,--the very day, most probably, when Noah entered the ark." The classical tradition of Greece, as if the events whence it took its rise had been viewed through a multiplying glass, appears to have been increased from one to many. Plutarch enumerates no fewer than five great floods; and Plato makes his Egyptian priest describe the Greek deluges as oft repeated and numerous. There was the flood of Deucalion, the flood of Ogyges, and several other floods; and no little time and learning have been wasted in attempting to fix their several periods. But, lying far within the mythologic ages,--the last of them to which any determining circumstances are attached, in the days of that Prometheus who stole fire from heaven, and was chained by Jupiter to Mount Caucasus,--it appears greatly more probable that the traditions respecting them should be the mere repeated and re-repeated echoes of one signal event, than that many wide-spread and destructive floods should have taken place in the obscure, fabulous ages of Grecian story, while not one such flood has happened during its two thousand five hundred years of authentic history. Nor is it difficult to conceive how such repetitions of the original tradition _should_ have taken place. The traditions of the same event preserved by tribes living in even the same tract of country come in course of time considerably to differ from each other in their adjuncts and circumstances; those, for instance, of the various tribes