ANTEDILUVIANS, the name given collect ively to the people who lived before the Deluge. The interval from the Creation to that event is not less, even according to the Hebrew text, than 1657 years, being not more than 691 years shorter than that between the Deluge and the birth of Christ, and only 187 years less than from the birth of Christ to the present time [1844], and equal to about two-sevenths of the whole period from the Creation. By the Samaritan and Septuagint texts (as adjusted by Hales) a much greater duration is assigned to the antediluvian period—namely, 2256 years, which nearly equals the Hebrew interval from the Deluge to the birth of Christ, and much exceeds the interval from the birth of Christ to the present time.
All our authentic information respecting this long and interesting period is contained in 49 verses of Genesis (iv. 16, to vi. S), more than half of which are occupied with a list of names, and ages, in valuable for chronology, but conveying no particu lars regarding the primeval state of man. The information thus afforded, although so limited in extent, is, however, eminently suggestive, and large treatises might be, and have been, written upon its intimations. Some additional information, though less direct, may be safely deduced from the history of Noah and the first men after the Deluge ; for it is very evident that society did not begin afresh after that event ; but that, through Noah and his sons, the new families of men were in a condition to inherit, and did inherit, such sciences and arts as existed before the Flood. This enables us to under stand how settled and civilized communities were established, and large and magnificent works under taken, within a few centuries after the Deluge.
In the article ADAM it has been shewn that the father of men was something more than the noble savage,' or rather the grown-up infant, which some have represented him. He was an instructed man ; and the immediate descendants of a man so instructed could not be an ignorant or uncultivated people. It is not necessary indeed to suppose that
they possessed at first more cultivation than they required ; and for a good while they did not stand in need of that which results from or is connected with, the settlement of men in organized communi ties. They probably had this before the Deluge, and at first were possessed of whatever knowledge or civilization their agricultural and pastoral pur suits required. Such were their pursuits from the first ; for it is remarkable that of the strictly savage or hunting condition of life there is not the slightest trace before the Deluge. After that event, Nim rod, although a hunter (Gen. x. 9) was not a savage, and did not belong to hunting tribes of men. In fact, savageism is not discoverable before the Confusion of Tongues, and was in all likelihood a degeneracy from a state of cultivation, eventually produced in particular communities by that great social convulsion. At least that a degree of culti vation was the primitive condition of man, from which savageism in particular quarters was a de generacy, and that he has not, as too generally has been supposed, worked himself up from an original savage state to his present position, has been power fully argued by Dr. Philip Lindsley (Am. Bib. Repos., iv. 277-298 ; vi. 1-27), and is strongly corroborated by the conclusions of modem ethno graphical research ; from which we learn that, while it is easy for men to degenerate into savages, no example has been found of savages rising into civilization but by an impulse from without, admin istered by a more civilized people ; and that, even with such impulse, the vis inertia of established habits is with difficulty overcome. The aboriginal traditions of all civilized nations describe them as receiving their civilization from without—generally through the instrumentality of foreign colonists ; and history affords no example of a case parallel to that which must have occurred if the primitive races of men, being originally savage, had civilized them selves.