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Show TIIE 1t£0NOGENISTS AND "schoolboy-days arc vividly stamped upon tho leaflets of memory. "Youth, however, merges inRensil>ly into cbildhood; but beyond his "seventh year even the child's remembrance fades away into infancy. "II01·e and there some circumstance, more or less important in his "awakening history, flashes like a meteor, or ililslikc an ignis fatuu,s, "across bis mind. Of its positive occurrence be is morally Aurc; of "its date in relation to his own age at tho time, onwards perhaps "from his third birthday, be knows nothing; except what he may "attain tln ugh inductive reasoning guided by tho reports of others "-his own self-accrcdilod r minisccncc of the event being more fro" qucntly than not, but the reflex of what may have been tol<l him, "in after li£ , by witnesses or logoproists.431 IIis cradle-hours ante" date !tis own memory: their incidents he has gathered from domes" tic traditions, or infers them by later observation of nursery-ceo" nomy with other babies. Ask him now-' When were you born?' "Our man lcnows not. ITo accepts his first birthday upon faith, 'the "cviclcncc of things unseen ;' '130 its epoch he receives upon hearsay. "The accounts he has heard of his infantile life, from nativity to his "second or third year, may be true enough; but, to himself, they are "anything rather than certainties. "Now, 'tho life of nations is long, and their traditions arc liable "to alteration; but that which memory is to individual man, history "is to mankind in gcncral.' 430 Viewing our Cosmic man, thcn, ·as "the symbol of the history of all humanity; and swcopiug our tole" scopes over the worl<l's monumental and documentary chronicles "extant at this day; at what age of humanity's life do the pctro" glyphs of tho oldest historical nation, the .Egyptians, first present "themselves to the archroologist? -that is, was the earliest known "civilization of the Nile's denizens, as now attested by the most "ancient stone-records at Memphis, infantile, puerile, adolescent or "adult? At which of the five stages of seven yeat·s, my tic~lly :: as.sumed ?Y, the old philosophers to be preliminaries of their 'great "ch~actcnc, do we enco.unter th~ first .Egyptian, at the IIId Mom-phi to dynasty, taken wtLh Lepsms about tho 35th century D. c., "or some 5300 years backward from our present hour? "You will find, after examination of the plates 437 before you, which :: ~;AURY, ~t~cndd8 P!euua du Afoyen-Age, Prnis, 8vo., 1848; pp. 28!>, 252-8, 201-77. A conv1ctwn of tluogs unseen;" PAUL, Epialle to the Uebrewa, xi. 1 :-SuAlll'E's New Teatammt, p. 406. ' 00 D11 DROTONNE, Filiationa et Migrations dra Peuplea. 487 Ll:PBIUS, DwkmiUer aua .!Egypten, Abth. I, D. 1-40; or thcrco.bout~, wldch, with other to.bleltux, were su~pendcd in front of the o.udience. Cf., o.lso, somo deductions from their ~tudy, de;cloped in the snme lecture, in Types of ilfanki11d, pp. 412-4. : nnd ndd now endless confirmo.t10ns resulling through MAlliET'J'E's Inter discoveries (supro., p. 4.8U-U4). TJIE POLYGENISTS. 507 "arc anthentic copics of the oldeat sculptures of man now known "upon earth, that neither infancy nor cl1ildhood is rcprcscnLcd by "these most ancient of records, hardly even adolescence; but that the "fir t Egyptian beheld on these al'chai.e hieroglyphs, leaps at a bound "from out of the night of unnumbered gcn rations antcce<lcnt to his "day, a full-grown, if a young, man-endowed with a civilization "already so advanced 5300 years ago, that it r quires an eye most "cxpcricnccd in Nilotic art to detect dif[crcnces of style between ''these pt·imordial s ulpturcs of the Hid, IVth, and VLh clynasLics, "and tho c of the more :florid Diospolitan, or Augustan, period of "the XVITth and XVIIIth dynasties, carved twenty centuries later, "and during Mosaic times in EO'ypt !" Such a practis d eye is the gift of our erudite coJlabomtor M. Pulszky ; and to his paper (ante, Chapter li), I beg leave to r fer tho reader for accurate details; closing, for myself, further definitions of cltr·onology with the philosophical comment of A. W. von Schlegel: 138 "Time has conveyed to us many kinds of chronology: it is tho business of historical criticism to di stingniRh between them and to estimate their value. The astronomical chronology changes purely theoretic cycles into historical periods; the mytldcal makes its way supported by obscnrc gcn alogical tables; the hypothetic is an invention of either ancient or modem chronographcrs; and, lastly, tho documentary rests upon the parallel uninterrupted demarcaLion of events, according to a settled reckoning of years. Tl1e last alone dcserve.9 to be called 'cltr·onology' in tlte strictest aense; it begins, however, muclt later than is eommonly supposed. !Iad tbis been duly considered, we might have dispensed with many an air-built system." Egypt, oldest of hi stori cal lauds, reprcsenLing, therefore, but tho "middl ages" of mankind's development upon earth, typified by our cosmic man, anivccl at one-third of the "three-score and ten years," imagined by IIcln·ew writers to be the average of post-MosaicaJ human longevity, it follows that, at the ]Tiel rlynasty, say 5300 y ars ago, the .Egyptians at least, among, v ry likely, other oriental naLions whose annals arc lost, had long before passed through their periods of adolescence, ckildhood, and infancy. If wo reflect that, si11 CC the fall of Grecian cultmo-itself built upon thousands of years of experi ence acquired by preceding Eastcrt1 natioMiities already, during the palmy day of IIellas, in their snpcran nuation or decrepitudeit has required some 2000 years of knowledge accumulated upon knowlc<lge, of inventions heaped upon discoveries, for our civiliza- .as Darstellung der Lb'gyptiachw .llfyt!wlogia * * * und Oflronologie (Prioho.rd's) V'orrtde, Donn, 1837; pp. xliv-1. m Types of Mankind, pp. 706- 12. |