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COMPARATIVE ARCHZOLOGY. 157 
stereotyped the former doctrine as the orthodox history of 
humanity. During the religious despotism, which obtained in 
Europe after the downfall of the Roman Empire, no one, or at 
least very few, seemed to have the courage, or perhaps the 
intelligence, to point out the manifest objections to this theory 
as the true explanation of the origin of mankind. If the 
white, black, and red skinned races were descended from one 
pair of ancestors it follows that their present physical differ- 
ences must have been moulded, under natural laws, since the 
act of creation. On the other hand, it has been shown from 
an analysis of the ancient sculptures and wall paintings of 
Egypt, that human racial characters have undergone little or 
no change during the last 6000 years, as the four principal 
races who then frequented the Nile valley were as broadly 
differentiated then as they are now. This slow rate of change 
in the physical constitution of these races undoubtedly implies 
a greater antiquity of mankind on earth than that assigned 
to them by the biblical narrative, as interpreted by Bishop 
_Usher. Similar deductions were founded on the widely diver- 
gent elements of the different languages, religious creeds, 
superstitious and other deep-seated customs. On_ these 
grounds it has been argued that the social and physical differ- 
ences between the various human races and families now 
existing on the globe had already been developed, under the 
slow growth of ages, long before the rise of the earliest 
empires of the old world. But such criticisms, being more 
academic than practical, were slow in assuming the defin'te- 
ness of a precise opinion, and hence they were not immediately 
affected by the rising spirit of inquiry which became manifest 
in some of the collateral sciences after the darkness of the 
middle ages began to give way under the influences of more 
enlightened generations. 
Among the chief causes which retarded investigations 
being made into the more remote field of pre-historic arche- 
ology was ignorance of the real nature of the evidential 
materials which lay concealed within its domain. Looking 
beyond the unreliable data of proto-historic times the mental 
vision was so circumscribed by a horizon of impenetrable 
darkness that successful research in that direction seemed 
