The Flood Tradition

There is, however, one special tradition which seems to be more deeply impressed and more widely spread than any of the others. The destruction of well nigh the whole human race, in an early age of the world's history, by a great deluge, appears to have so impressed the minds of the few survivors, and seems to have been handed down to their children, in consequence, with such terror-struck impressiveness, that their remote descendants of the present day have not yet forgotten it. It appears in almost every mythology, and lives in the most distant countries, and among them the most barbarous tribes.

Miller, Hugh, The Testimony of the Rocks Or Geology in its Bearings on the Two Theologies Natural and Revealed, 1857, p. 284.