India the Cradle of the Sciences. 331 



Egypt was also repeatedly invaded by nomadic tribes. The 

 first conquest is that called the conquest of the shepherd kino-s, 

 about the year 1750 before Christ. They retained their con- 

 quest for two centuries. During this period, the order of the 

 priests was entirely cast down, and the fountains of science dried 

 up. The second irruption was that of the Medes and Persians 

 under Cambyses. Posteriorly to our era, there came other no- 

 madic tribes still^the Saracens, and, lastly, the Turks. We do 

 not reckon the conquest at the time of Alexander, which was in 

 fact far from being hostile to civilization, as the Greeks were at 

 that time more advanced than the Egyptians. 

 ' The sciences, then, being in the east conliiuially retarded by 

 the irruptions of barbarians, were not placed in circumstances 

 favourable to their development, until they had penetrated into 

 the west, passing from the Egyptians to the Greeks, and fron) 

 these latter to the rest of Europe. As to the Indians, they 

 have not directly contributed to our civilization, and in fact it 

 13 only a very short time since any scientific communication has 

 been established between their country and ours. 



Yet it is in India, according to all appearance, that we are to 

 look for the origin of the sciences. It is in that country, in 

 fiact, that the men who escaped from the deluge must have esta- 

 blished themselves. The loftiest mountains of the globe, the 

 chains of Himalaya and Thibet, would afford them an asylum, 

 and the bases of these mountains would present them with the 

 first cultivatable land. Babylonia could then have been nothing 

 but marshes, and Egypt was yet under water. In fact, all the 

 low part, as the priests told Herodotus, is a gift of the Nile. 

 That river each year dcposites a new layer of mud. By count- 

 ing the number of superimposed layers, which are easily distin- 

 guished from each other, it may be seen how much the land 

 rises in a given time ; and in this manner we come by a very 

 simple calculation to the result, t/iat, 2000 years before Christ, 

 the xt}1u)le of Lower Egypt had no existence. 



The priority of the Indians is further shewn by a tradition, 

 to which no attention seems hitherto to have been paid. It is 

 in fact in the extracts which have been preserved of the works 

 of Manetho, that, in the reign of Amenophis, a king of the six- 

 teenth dynasty, a colony came from India to settle in Ethiopia. 



