conflagrations and great droughts, they do not merely dispeople, but destroy. Phaeton’s car went but a day; and the three years’ drought in the time of Elias,532 was but particular,533 and left people alive. As for the great burnings by lightnings, which are often in the West Indies,534 they are but narrow;535 but in the other two destructions, by deluge and earthquake, it is further to be noted, that the remnant of people which happen to be reserved, are commonly ignorant and mountainous people, that can give no account of the time past; so that the oblivion is all one, as if none had been left. If you consider well of the people of the West Indies, it is very probable that they are a newer, or a younger people than the people of the old world; and it is much more likely that the destruction that hath heretofore been there, was not by earthquakes, (as the Egyptian priest told Solon, concerning the Island of Atlantis,536 that it was swallowed by an earthquake), but rather that it was desolated by a particular deluge, for earthquakes are seldom in those parts; but, on the other side, they have such pouring rivers, as the rivers of Asia, and Africa, and Europe, are but brooks to them. Their Andes, likewise, or mountains, are far higher than those with us; whereby it seems, that the remnants of generations of men were in such a particular deluge saved. As for the observation that Machiavel hath, that the jealousy of sects doth much extinguish the memory of things,537 traducing Gregory the Great, that he did what in him lay to extinguish all heathen antiquities, I do not find that those zeals do any great effects, nor last long; as it appeared in the succession of Sabinian,538 who did revive the former antiquities.
The vicissitude, or mutations, in the superior globe, are no fit matter for this present argument. It may be, Plato’s great year,539 if the world should last so long, would have some effect, not in renewing the state of