NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 153 



himself : we find sculptured upou the early monuments types of 

 the various races — Egyptians, Israelites, negroes, and Libyans — 

 as clearly distinguishable in these paintings and sculptures of 

 from four to six thousand years ago as the same types are at the 

 ■present day. No one can look at these sculptures upon the Egyp- 

 tian monuments, or even the f ac-similes of them, as given by Lep- 

 sius or Prisse d'Avennes, without being convinced that they 

 indicate, even at that remote period, a difference of races so great 

 that long previous ages must have been required to produce it. 



Take, next, the social condition of Egypt revealed in these 

 early monuments of art : they force us to the same conclusion. 

 Those earliest monuments show that a very complex society had 

 even then been developed. We not only have a separation be- 

 tween the priestly and military orders, but agriculturists, manu- 

 facturers, and traders, with a whole series of subdivisions in 

 each of these classes. The early tombs show us sculptured and 

 painted representations of a daily life which even then had been 

 developed into a vast wealth and variety of grades, forms, and 

 usages. 



Take, next, the political and military condition : one fact out of 

 many reveals a policy which must have been the result of long 

 experience. Just as now, at the end of the nineteenth century, 

 the British Government, having found that they can not rely 

 upon the native Egyptians for the protection of the country, are 

 drilling the negroes from the interior of Africa as soldiers, so the 

 celebrated inscription of Prince Una, as far back as the sixth 

 dynasty, speaks of the Maksi or negroes levied and drilled by 

 tens of thousands for the Egyptian army. 



Take, next, engineering : here we find very early operations in 

 the way of canals, dikes, and great public edifices, so bold in con- 

 ception and thorough in execution as to fill our greatest engineers 

 of these days with astonishment. The quarrying, conveyance, 

 cutting, jointing, and polishing of the enormous blocks in the 

 interior of the Great Pyramid alone are the marvel of the fore- 

 most stone-workers of our century. 



As regards architecture, we find not only the pyramids, which 

 date from the very earliest period of Egyptian history, and which 

 are to this hour the wonder of the world for size, for boldness, for 

 exactness, and for skillful contrivance, but also the temples with 

 long ranges of colossal columns wrought in polished granite, with 

 wonderful beauty of ornamentation, with architraves and roofs 

 vast in size and exquisite in adjustment, which by their propor- 

 tions tax the imagination, and lead the beholder to ask whether 

 all this can be real. 



As to sculpture, we have not only the great Sphinx of Gizeh, 

 so wonderful by its boldness and plastic character, dating from 



