TWO KINDS OF CHRONOLOGY. 79 



Antiquity of Man, one, and one only, gives 

 us any knowledge of Time-absolute ; and 

 that is History. From all the others we can 

 gather only the less definite information of 

 Time-relative. They can tell us of nothing 

 more than of the order in which certain events 

 took place. But of the length of interval 

 between those events, neither Archaeology, nor 

 Geology, nor Ethnology can tell us anything. 

 Even History, that is, the records of Written 

 Documents, carries us back to times of which 

 no contemporary account remains, and the 

 distance of which in years from any known 

 epoch is, and must be, a matter of con- 

 jecture. No other history than the Hebrew 

 History even professes to go back to the 

 Creation of Man, or to give any account of 



