GREAT MEN OF ANCIENT TIMES. 121 



he was eighty, as was the case of Leslie, the British theological 

 author, and "Old Parr" is said to have had two children after he 

 had passed eighty years of age. The father of Fox, the statesman, 

 had a birth-rank of [78], and Amelie Rives, the authoress, had a 

 birth-rank of [71]. Nor is there any reason for doubting the 

 substantial accuracy of these ages. Moses was a finely educated 

 man who lived in an age and a country in which there was an 

 educated class, and if he wrote the records so as to deceive pos- 

 terity he did something which is at variance with every other act 

 of his life. Nor is there any conceivable reason why he should 

 do such a thing. It is not at all necessary to assume that the 

 records of the immediate ancestors of Moses are at all parallel to 

 the Mosaic records of the misty past as given in the Book of 

 Genesis. In the absence of detailed information we might corre- 

 spondingly write English history as follows: Plantagenets lived 

 an hundred and thirty and one years and begat Tudors ; and Tudors 

 lived an hundred and eighteen years and' begat Stuarts, etc. In 

 addition to this remarkable ancestry on the paternal side of Moses, 

 we have a case of in-breeding through the marriage of Amram to 

 his aunt, and the consequent bringing of this remarkable ancestry 

 into the maternal side. 



ESTIMATE OF MOSES. 



Accompanying this unparalleled ancestry we have in Moses 

 an intellect surpassing anything that the world has ever seen. We 

 talk glibly of the impossibility of organizing the colored men and 

 transporting them to Africa, but if such a thing is impossible now, 

 how much more impossible would such a plan have appeared if 

 proposed before 1860? And yet freeing the Israelites from 

 Egyptian bondage and removing them to beyond the Red Sea was 



