408 SIR CHARLES LYELL 



much wit and ingenuity would be required to modify and 

 defend their old positions. Each new invention would 

 violate a greater number of known analogies; for if a theory 

 be required to embrace some false principle, it becomes more 

 visionary in proportion as facts are multiplied, as would be 

 the case if geometers were now required to form an astro- 

 nomical system on the assumption of the immobility of the 

 earth. 



Amongst other fanciful conjectures concerning the history 

 of Egypt, we may suppose some of the following to be 

 started. 'As the banks of the Nile have been so recently 

 colonized for the first time, the curious substances called 

 mummies could never in reality have belonged to men. 

 They may have been generated by some plastic virtue re- 

 siding in the interior of the earth, or they may be abortions 

 of Nature produced by her incipient efforts in the work 

 of creation. For if deformed beings are sometimes born 

 even now, when the scheme of the universe is fully de- 

 veloped, many more may have been " sent before their time 

 scarce half made up," when the planet itself was in the 

 embryo state. But if these notions appear to derogate 

 from the perfection of the Divine attributes, and if these 

 mummies be in all their parts true representations of the 

 human form, may we not refer them to the future rather 

 than the past? May we not be looking into the womb 

 of Nature, and not her grave? May not these images be 

 like the shades of the unborn in Virgil's Elysium the 

 archetypes of men not yet called into existence?* 



These speculations, if advocated by eloquent writers, would 

 not fail to attract many zealous votaries, for they would 

 relieve men from the painful necessity of renouncing precon- 

 ceived opinions. Incredible as such scepticism may appear, 

 it has been rivalled by many systems of the sixteenth and 

 seventeenth centuries, and among others by that of the 

 learned Falloppio. who, as we have seen (p. 33), regarded 

 the tusks of fossil elephants as earthly concretions, and the 

 pottery or fragments of vases in the Monte Testaceo, near 

 Rome, as works of nature, and not of art. But when 

 one generation had passed away, and another, not com- 

 promised to the support of antiquated dogmas, had sue- 



