Encounters with Adam, or at least the hyaenas: Nineteenth-century visual representations of the deep past

Adam is indeed dead in the flesh – at least until the final resurrection – but in visual representations he is alive and well and on view in every major museum of natural history. The World before the Deluge, which contains Figuier's timemachine series, was no exception. Already in its sixth edition by 1872, it had by then appeared in English, German, Spanish, Danish and probably other languages too. That Deluge was clearly not the one that was recalled in Genesis and other ancient literatures. On this point Figuier adopted a standard compromise of the period. Needless to say, however, Figuier was not the author of the genre. By the time Figuier borrowed from his work, Unger had become professor of botany in Vienna, but when he first published his series of 'landscape representations' he held a similar but provincial post in Graz.