UNWRITTEN HISTORY. 321 



conveys high praise. For it is just because it is true that these mighty 

 children became the fathers of natural knowledge. Men of science are 

 eternal children, always asking questions of Mother Nature, and never 

 content with her answers. 



But, whether questions are childlike or childish, depends upon the 

 knowledge and the intelligence of the questioner ; and Herodotus, as 

 I have said, was largely endowed with both. Let me remind you that 

 he lived midway between Thales and Aristotle, in the very heart and 

 center of the great age of Greece ; and let me also remind you of the 

 fact, of which people too often remain ignorant throughout their school 

 and university career, that, if this was an epoch of great achievements 

 in art, in literature, and in philosophy, it was no less distinguished for 

 the sedulous cultivation of physical science. Democritus, the contem- 

 porary of Herodotus, was the great exponent of principles which have 

 played, and still play, a great part in modern scientific speculation. 

 Half a century before Herodotus, Xenophanes had observed petrified 

 marine shells and fish-bones in the quarries of Syracuse and elsewhere ; 

 he had drawn the conclusion that the rocks in which they were con- 

 tained were the hardened mud of the bottom of the sea in which the 

 corresponding animals once lived ; and he had laid down the general 

 proposition that the geographical features of our earth are not con- 

 stant, but that where land now is, sea has been, and where sea is, land 

 has been. And it is a corollary from this proposition that the land 

 which constitutes any country has not always been what it is and 

 where it is, but that it has a history, unwritten save in the hieroglyph- 

 ics of Nature. Herodotus is not likely to have been ignorant of the 

 speculations of Xenophanes, but it is in evidence that his extensive 

 travels had enabled him to observe facts which led directly to like con- 

 clusions. The plain of Ilium and the estuary of the Mreander had 

 shown him rivers at work in the formation of new land, and he adverts 

 to the conclusions to be drawn from the presence of shells in the rocks 

 which bound the Nile Valley. 



To a mind thus prepared by an acquaintance with elementary 

 truths of physical science, the first glance at Egypt can not fail to 

 suggest inquiry, and, in fact, Herodotus says as much : 



" Any one who sees Egypt, without having heard a word about it 

 before, must perceive, if he has the least intelligence, that the Egypt 

 to which the Greeks go in their ships is a gift of the Nile to the Egyp- 

 tians." * That is to say, as he elsewhere explains, the rich soil of the 

 great plain, or so-called Delta of Egypt, has been formed out of the 

 deposits left by the Nile during the annual inundation. The region 

 occupied by the delta, he adds, was " evidently, at one time, a gulf of 

 the sea. It resembles, to compare small things with great, the parts 

 about Ilium and Teuthrania, Ephesus, and the plain of the Maeander. 

 In all these regions the land has been formed by rivers, whereof the 



* Those and other citations are taken from Rawlinson's " Herodotus." 

 vol. xxiii. 21 



