OLD NOAH'S STONE BARGE

One by one the illusions and delusions of myth and fable are being converted into the matter-of-fact of History. The "higher criticism" is taking the romance alike out of the Iliad and the Old Testament. Now yet another blow has been struck: "Old Noah He Did Build An Ark" thus runs the famous song: now it appears that he did nothing of the sort. Or rather, instead of being "an hundred cubits long and pitched within and without," it was solidly constructed of gigantic stone blocks; the completed edifice having four faces and four edges meeting in a point. In other words, the "ark" was, and still is for that matter, nothing less than the Great Pyramid of Cheeps.

Such in the startling theory of Dr. Getsinger, for thirty five years Egyptoloaist and research worker. First, he deduces from the marks of wave erosion which he finds at a common level on all the pyramids, that the Nile valley was for thousands of years under the sea. At this name time, he places the vanishing of the "lost kingdom of Atlantic". Years later Cheopa had the pyramids finished with smooth stone,--a publicity stunt still good after four thousand years. But nevertheless he was really only an interloper. Are not the "three stories" of Noah's Ark duplicated in three chambers of different levels in the pyramid? The entrance to the highest chamber, that of Japhet, according to Dr. Getsinger, points conveniently at the North Star just as it was indubitably intended to do when first built thirty thousand years ago when the earth was at the same point in its processional cycle. As for the animals of the Ark, they refer to the symbolic or spiritual animals of the Zodiac--for of course it is only to be expected that such a powerful race intellectually would select precisely a Bull, a Crab, a Goat, a Water-Bearer, etc., from all the possible things there were to choose from.-- "The animals went in two by two"; fortunately there are twelve signs in the Zodiac.

So far so good. But what about the "forty days and forty nights" that the fountains of the deep were opened? What does that signify? The astronomers have shown that Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine months, nor years as the Bible has it. At that rate, the celebrated rain-storm of Noah's time lasted about three days and the Ark might well have been built right here in Boston. But movements in the earth's crust are of such a gradual nature that even Dr. Getsinger's twelve thousand years from submersion to emergence is pretty fast work. Nature never hurries. But if we add yet another 30,000 years (a second cycle of the pole star) we should find that Pithecanthropus Erectus was posing in Java as the "father of us all" at about the time that "obviously and indubitably the ancients must have been infinitely more spiritual than ourselves and their power lay in their greater understanding of the universe and its laws"--to quote Dr. Getsinger. Oh well! When Anthropology conflicts with Geology and Archaeology with Tradition it is time for the layman to "stand from under".