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CHAPTEE XII. 



ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



A LTHOUGH the facts recorded in the preceding chapters 

 ~L. have been for the most part discovered within a com- 

 paratively recent period, it is by no means merely of late 

 years, or among archaeologists only, that the difficulties in 

 Archbishop Usher's chronology have been felt to be insuper- 

 able. Historians, philologists, and physiologists have alike 

 admitted that the short period allowed could hardly be recon- 

 ciled with the history of some Eastern nations ; that it did 

 not leave room for the development either of the different 

 languages, or (assuming the unity of the human race) for the 

 important physical peculiarities by which the various races 

 of men are distinguished. 



Thus, Dr. Prichard says : " Many writers who have been 

 by no means inclined to raise objections against the authority 

 of the Sacred Scriptures, and in particular Michaelis, have 

 felt themselves embarrassed by the shortness of the interval 

 between the Noachic Deluge and the period at which the 

 records of various nations commence, or the earliest date to 

 which their historical memorials lead us back. The extrava- 

 gant claims to a remote and almost fathomless antiquity, 

 made by the fabulists of many ancient nations, have vanished 

 before the touch of accurate criticism ; but after abstracting 

 all that is apparently mythological from the early traditions 

 of the Indians, Egyptians, and some other nations, the pro- 

 bable history of some of them seems still to reach up to a 

 period too remote to be reconciled with the short chronology 



