80 latTISH ASSOCIATION. 



subject. Ethnology is a wide and fertile subject, and I sliould be led far beyond 

 the limits of an inaugural discourse ■were I to indulge in au historical sketcli of 

 its progress. But I may advert to the testimony of different witnesses — lo 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 sedi- 

 mentary deposits of the Nile in Egypt as a test of the lapse of time during which 

 that most recpnt and still operating geological dynamic had been in progress. In 

 two Memoirs communicated to the Eoyal Society in 1855 and 1858, the result of 

 ninety-five vertical borings through the alluvium tluis formed are recorded. In 

 the excavations near the colossus of Rameses II. at Memphis, there wei'C 9 feet 

 4 inches of Nile sediment between 8 inches below the present surface of the 

 grouFid 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.x>, 1854 gives 3,215 years during which the 

 above sediment was accumulated ; or a mean rate of increase of S^ inches in a cen- 

 tury. Below the platform there were 82 feet of the total depth penetrated ; but 

 the lowest 2 feet consisted of sand, below which it is possible there may be no true 

 Nile sediment in this locality, thus leaving MO feet of the latter. If that amount 

 has been deposited at the same rate of 8^ 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 39 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 fashion clay into vessels, and to 

 know how to harden then by the action of a strong heat," Prof. Max Miiller has 

 opened out a simiLar vista into the remote past of the history of the human race 

 by the perception and application of analogies in the formation of modern and 

 ancient, of living and dead, languages. From the relations traceable between Ihe 

 six Romance dialects, Italian, Wallachian, Rhsetian, Spanish, Portuguese, and 

 French, an antecedent common " mother-tongue" might be inferred, and, con- 

 sequently the existence of a race anterior to modern Italians, Spanish, French, &c., 

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

 of the primitive stock, and for the modifieations which the mother-language had 

 undergone. History and preserved writings show that such common mother-race 

 and language have existed in the Roman people and the Latin tongue. But Latin 

 like the equally " dead" language Greek, with Sanscrit, Lithuanian, Zend, and the 

 Gothic, Sclavonic, and Celtic tongues, can be similarly shown to be modifications of 

 one antecedent common language; whence is to be inferred an antecedent race of 

 men, and a lapse of time sufficient for their migration over a tract extending from 

 Iceland in the north-west to India in the south-east, and for all the above-named 

 modifications to have been established in the common mother " Arian" tongue. 



