MECHANICS AND USEFUL ARTS. 35 



respondcnce between their localities and general zoological provinces. But,- 

 with regard to the alleged conformity between the geographical distribution 

 of man and animals, which has of late been systematically enunciated, and 

 made by Agassis, in Gliddon & Nott's " Varieties of Mankind," the basis of 

 deductions as to the origin and distinction of the human varieties, many 

 facts might be cited, affecting the conformity of the distribution of man 

 with that of the lower animals and plants, as absolutely enunciated in some 

 recent works. Nor can we be surprised to find that the migratory instincts 

 of the human species, with the peculiar endowment of adaptiveness to all 

 climates, should have produced modifications in geographical distribution 

 to which the lower forms of living nature have not been subject. Ethnology 

 is a wide and fertile subject, and I should be led far beyond the limits of an. 

 inaugural discourse were I to indulge in an historical sketch of its progress. 

 But I may advert to the testimony of different witnesses to the concurrence 

 of distinct species of evidence as to the much higher antiquity of the 

 human race, than has been assigned to it in historical and genealogical 

 records. 



Mr. Leonard Horner discerned the value of the phenomena of the annual 

 sedimentary deposits of the Nile in Egypt as a test of the lapse of time dur- 

 ing which that most recent and still operating geological dynamid had been 

 in progress. In two Memoirs communicated to the Royal Society in 1855 

 and 1858, the result of ninety-five vertical borings through the alluvium thus 

 formed are recorded. In the excavations near the colossus of Rameses II., 

 at Memphis, there were nine feet four inches of Nile sediment between eight 

 inches below the present surface of the ground and the lowest part of the 

 platform on which the statue had stood. Supposing the platform to have 

 been laid in the middle of the reign of that king, viz., 1361 B. c., such date 

 added to A. D. 1854, gives 3,215 years during which the above sediment was 

 accumulated ; or a mean rate of increase of three and a half inches in a cen- 

 tury. Below the platform there were thirty-two feet of the total depth pene- 

 trated; but the lowest two feet consisted of sand, below which it is possible 

 there may be no true Nile sediment in this locality, thus leaving thirty feet 

 of the latter. If that amount has been deposited at the same rate of three 

 and a half inches in a century, it gives for the lowest part deposited an age 

 of 10,285 years before the middle of the reign of Rameses II., and 13,500 

 years before A. D. 1854. The Nile sediment at the lowest depth reached is 

 very similar in composition to that of the present day. In the lowest part 

 of the boring of the sediment at the colossal statue in Memphis, at a depth 

 of thirty-nine feet from the surface of the ground, the instrument is reported 

 to have brought up a piece of pottery. This, therefore, Mr. Horner infers 

 to be a record of the existence of man 13,371 years before A. D. 1854 : " Of 

 man moreover, in a state of civilization, so far, at least, as to be able to fash- 

 ion clay into vessels, and to know how to harden them by the action of a 

 strong heat." Professor Max Miiller has opened out a similar vista into the 

 remote past of the history of the human race by the perception and applica- 

 tion of analogies in the formation of modern and ancient, of living and dead, 

 languages. From the relations traceable between the six Romance dialects, 

 Italian, Wallachian, Khsetian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, an antece- 

 dent common " mother-tongue " might be inferred, and, consequently the 

 existence of a race anterior to the modern Italians, Spanish, French, etc., 

 with conclusions as to the lapse of time requisite for such divisions and mi- 

 grations of the primitive stock, and for the modifications which the mother- 



