Conclusion

Summary

No one can ascend up to their springs along the streams by which the tribes of the present human race have been carried down: still less can any eye pierce across the chasm, which there severs the order of things wherein we and our history are comprised, from an earlier one. That a former race of mankind has passed away, is a general popular belief; and it was shared and cherished by the Greek philosophers: but they dissent from the people in this: Plato and Aristotle suppose that a few, embers as it were, had escaped from the general ruin, and that from them a new race of mankind had gradually spread over the desolated earth; while the people in the renewed life of man saw a new creation, the Lai of Deucalion, the Myrmidons of Æacus; and deemed the extinct race rebels against the heavenly powers, led astray by the consciousness of their enormous strength. So the later Jews dreamt of giants before the deluge; so the Greeks of the Titans of Phlegra, and of those who perished in the flood of Deucalion or of Ogyges: so the savages of North America fable of the Mammoth, that the devastated world had invoked the lightnings of heaven, and not in vain, against the reason-gifted monster, the man of the primitive age.