5. Because it was always unknown to every other nation till the time of its being translated by the Seventy. 6. Because, even after the translation ascribed to the Seventy, we have not a single author among the Gentiles who quotes a single passage from this book, down to the time of Longinus, who lived under the Emperor Aurelian. 7. Because no other nation ever admitted a universal deluge before Ovid's "Metamorphoses"; and even Ovid himself does not make his deluge extend beyond the Mediterranean. 8. Because St. Augustine expressly acknowledges that the universal deluge was unknown to all antiquity. 9. Because the first deluge of which any notice is taken by the Gentiles, is that mentioned by Berosus, and which he fixes at about four thousand four hundred years before our vulgar era; which deluge did not extend beyond the Euxine Sea. 10. Finally, because no monument of a universal deluge remains in any nation in the world. In addition to all these reasons, it must be observed, that the critic did not even understand the simple state of the question. The only inquiry is, whether we have any natural proof that the sea has successively abandoned many tracts of territory? and upon this plain and mere matter-of-fact subject, M. Abbé François has taken occasion to abuse men whom he certainly neither knows nor understands. It is far better to be silent, than merely to increase the quantity of bad books. The same critic, in order to prop up old ideas, now almost universally despised and derided, and which have not the slightest relation to Moses, thinks proper to say: "Berosus perfectly agrees with Moses in the number of generations before the Deluge." Be it known to you, my dear reader, that this same Berosus is the writer who informs us that the fish Oannes came out to the river Euphrates every day, to go and preach to the Chaldæans; and that the same fish wrote with one of its bones a capital book about the origin of things. Such is the writer whom the ingenious abbé brings forward as a voucher for Moses. "Is it not evident," he says, "that a great number of European families, transplanted to the coasts of Africa, have become, without any mixture of African blood, as black as any of the natives of the country?" It is just the contrary of this, M. l'Abbé, that is evident. You are ignorant that the "_reticulum mucosum_" of the negroes is black, although I have mentioned the fact times innumerable. Were you to have ever so large a number of children born to you in Guinea, of a European wife, they would not one of them have that black unctuous skin, those dark and thick lips, those round eyes, or that woolly hair, which form the specific differences of the negro race. In the same manner, were your family established in America, they would have beards, while a native American will have none. Now extricate yourself from the difficulty, with Adam and Eve only, if you can.