194 THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL. 



to the fullest extent by declaring that the 

 Egyptians were skilful potters about 20,000 

 years B.C. ; while he modestly assures other 

 speculators of the same school who were 

 somewhat in advance of his calculations, 

 that there is no reason to believe that man 

 was a denizen of earth at any earlier 

 period. He arrives at this conclusion from 

 the fact of some pieces of pottery having 

 been found at a certain depth in the 

 alluvial mud of the Nile, which he calcu- 

 lated would require upwards of 20,000 

 years to reach, allowing the rate of 

 sinkage so much a century. But his esti- 

 mate was speedily blown to the winds by 

 the fact of some of this Nile pottery being 

 found stamped with the Grecian honey- 

 suckle, which proved that it could not 

 be older than Alexander the Great's 

 conquest of Egypt, i.e., circa 300 years 

 B.C. And as if further to expose the 

 rashness of making such calculations about 

 the age of man on earth, shortly after the 

 Bunsen incident in the Nile mud, the late 

 Sir Robert Stephen son, when engineering 



