During the last two years the newspapers have more than once announced with a flourish of headlines that undoubted evidences of the Great Flood had been discovered in Mesopotamia.

The average reader felt quite excited. Noah’s Ark had been his earliest Sunday toy, and he had always felt vaguely aggrieved in later years on being told that nowadays learned people considered the Story of the Flood to be merely a myth. Consequently a good many readers eagerly read the articles, which held out a promise of restoring a cherished tale of childhood, only to find themselves involved in technical details of excavations in buried cities belonging to remote civilizations with unpronounceable names of which they had never heard.