THE LAPSE OF TIME. 1C I 



of time ; and that those who persist in measuring time 

 by similar records, are the victims of a manifest delu- 

 sion, ensnared, it may be feared in too many cases, with 

 their eyes open. 



There is an old jest that, in the pride of antiquity, a 

 Welshman generally traces back his lineage not only as 

 far as Adam, but a great deal further. Nothing was 

 easier, before the age of historical criticism, than for 

 men or nations, whose real origin was lost in obscurity, 

 to link their names to an illustrious past. Nothing was 

 easier than to develope the obscurity itself into a long 

 line of remote ancestors, whose names and virtues could 

 be invented and multiplied at pleasure. What the poet 

 was only too willing to imagine, the mathematician 

 seemed able to confirm, by registering astronomical 

 occurrences in far-distant long-past ages with as much 

 precision as those which he predicted, and predicted 

 truly, for his own and future times. The Hindoo 

 chronology reckons the age of the world by millions 

 of years. The Egyptians twenty centuries ago used 

 to tell of 330 kings of whom they knew no more than 

 the names. There were Greeks who claimed to be 

 older than the moon ; others who anticipated the theory 

 of biogenesis by claiming to be sprung from the earth 

 itself without the intervention of parents; and yet 

 others, who with more modesty or more pride, as we 

 please to regard it, derived their origin from gods 

 and demigods. None were willing to be thought new 

 people. The man of yesterday, the novus homo, the 

 upstart, the parvenu, has ever been disliked and laughed 



