384 HISTORICAL EVIDENCE. 



of Usher and Petavius. This has been so universally felt 

 by all those writers who have entered on the investigation 

 of primeval history that it is superfluous to dwell upon the 

 subject."* 



Baron Bunsen, one of the ablest among those who regard 

 the various forms of language as having had a common origin, 

 is forced to claim for the human race an antiquity of at least 

 20,000 years. Again, the ingenious author of " The Genesis 

 of the Earth and of Man/'f says truly that " one of the greatest 

 of the difficulties that beset us when we endeavour to account 

 for the commonly supposed descent of all mankind from a 

 single pair, .... lies in the fact of our rinding, upon Egyptian 

 monuments, mostly of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth 

 centuries before the Christian era, representations of indivi- 

 duals of numerous nations, African, Asiatic, and European, 

 differing in physical characteristics as widely as any equal 

 number of nations of the present age that could be grouped 

 together ; amongr these beinsj Negroes, of the true Negritian 



O 7 - O O O ' O 



stamp, depicted with a fidelity, as to colour and features, 

 hardly to be surpassed by an accomplished modern artist. 

 That such diversities had been produced by natural means in 

 the interval between that remote age and the time of Noah, 

 probably no one versed in the sciences of anatomy and phy- 

 siology will consider credible ;" and he concludes, therefore, 

 that the human race cannot have been derived from a single 

 pair. For, just as the philological difficulties will not, of 

 course, affect those who accept literally the account given in 

 our English Version of the miraculous creation of languages 

 at the Tower of Babel ; so in the same way " the shortness of 

 the period allowed by the received chronology, for the develop- 

 ment of those physical varieties which distinguish the different 



* Prichard, Researches into the Physical Hist, of Mankind, vol. v. 

 p. 553. 



f 1. c. p. 117. 



