[Illustration: Fig. 109. APAMÆAN MEDAL.] Such are some of the traditions of that great catastrophe which overtook the human family in its infancy, and made so deep an impression on the memories of the few awe-struck survivors, that the race never forgot it. Ere the dispersal of the family it would have of course existed as but one unique recollection,--a single reflection on the face of an unbroken mirror. But the mirror has since been shattered into a thousand pieces; and we now find the object, originally but one, pictured in each broken fragment, with various degrees of distinctness, according to the various degrees of injury received by the reflecting medium. _Picture_, too, scarce less certainly than language spoken and written, testifies to the wide extent of the tradition. Its symbols are found stamped on coins of old classical Greece; they have been traced amid the ancient hieroglyphics of Egypt, recognized in the sculptured caves of Hindustan, and detected even in the far west, among the picture writings of Mexico. The several glyphic representatives of the tradition bear, like its various written or oral editions, a considerable resemblance to each other. Even in the rude paintings of the old Mexican, the same leading idea may be traced as in the classic sculpture of the Greek. On what is known to antiquaries as the Apamæan medal, struck during the reign of Philip the elder, we find the familiar name of _Noe_ inscribed on a floating chest or ark, within which a man and woman are seen seated, and to which a bird on the wing is represented as bearing a branch.[26] And in an ancient Mexican painting, figured by Humboldt, "the man and woman who survived the age of water" are shown similarly inclosed in a leaf-tufted box, or hollow trunk of a tree; while a gigantic female,--Matalcueje, the goddess of water,--is seen pouring down her floods around them, and upon an overwhelmed human figure, representative apparently of the victims of the catastrophe. All is classical in the forms of the one representation, and uncouth in those of the other. They bear the same sort of _artistic_ relation to each other that the rude Tamanac tradition bears, in a _literary_ point of view, to the well constructed story and elegant verse of Ovid; but they are charged apparently with the same meaning, and shadow forth the same event. [Illustration: Fig. 110. OLD MEXICAN PICTURE. (_Humboldt._)]