548 Proceedings. 
Mr. Smith, our highest authority, believes that a very early period may be allowed 
to some of the Babylonian tablets, but names Urukh, who reigned at Ur, about 2,000 
B.C., as the earliest king to whom any of the existing tablets can be attributed with any 
degree of confidence. We know that Abraham, according to the book of Genesis, eame 
originally from this same Ur, and that his vocation, according to Usher's chronology, was 
1,921 B.C., or, according to Josephus, 2,083. Is it possible that an account of the deluge 
was brought from Chaldea by Abraham, handed down through his descendants to Moses, 
and that the condensed narrative of Holy Writ can now be retraced to its original and 
ampler source? Quite recently Dr. Schliemann, after years of excavations on the spot 
which he considered as the site of Ancient Troy, passing through, first, the ruin of a 
modern town,—next of an earlier one of about the age of Alexander the Great,—there- 
after finding a third layer of wrecked abodes, with only rude stone implements, arrived at 
Jast, at a depth of from 33 to 50 feet from the surface, at the original débris of the earliest 
habitations; here, in what he calls the remains of Troy itself, metal is again found; 
gold and bronze, with pottery, demonstrating that the more civilized Trojans made way 
for a ruder people, who were again succeeded by Greeks. Animated by these discoveries, 
Schliemann arranged for further searching for Homer's heroes, and has, at Mycenee, just 
as described by the old blind poet, found tombs containing many golden objects, but 
nothing indicating the use of iron by the long-buried race. Iron, indeed, is mentioned 
in the Iliad, but only as used for arrow-heads ; thus, whilst much which was accounted 
"history" ean be proved to be fiction, there seems every probability that, in song, we 
shall find many facts, embodied, indeed, in mere poetic colouring matter, which will tend 
to give us stepping-stones across the flood of unknown time. 
The spirit of enquiry has not been limited to those countries which—like Egypt, 
Chaldea, Greece, Rome— have left behind them records for our instruction as to their 
places in cosmography ; as, in New Zealand, we have hunted up the kitchen middens of 
the moa-hunters for the weapons and utensils of the early inhabitants of this land, 
so elsewhere a similar process has been applied to caves, tumuli, gravel beds, lake 
dwellings, and all soureés whence light could be obtained as to the ways and means of 
prehistoric or et man; the importance of the discoveries thus made caused Ranke, the 
first of living German historians, when bringing out three years ago a second edition of 
his Prussian ses originally published in 1848, to re-write all the earlier portion of it, 
assigning as the reason in his preface, “ not only has the knowledge of events, been 
largely increased by zealous and successful enquiry, but the general range of view has 
been widened.” 
. One of the first questions which we naturally ask ourselves when considering the 
early history of the human race, or anthropology, as it has been termed, is—When, 
geologically speaking, did man appear on the earth? with what animals was he con- 
temporaneous? We all know that a world—in some essentials this world, though under 
very different conditions from the present—had an existence countless ages ago, and that 
many remains of gigantic and wonderful animals have been disinterred under a variety 
of circumstances; but you must by no means suppose that all these varieties of life were 
coexistent: thousands of years must have separated them. The great saurians had 
departed ere many animals now extinct had even appeared. We know that animals do 
- disappear certain countries, amd even from the face of the earth. The wolf, the 
se -the — inhabited the British Isles within dates which are fixable; but, 
2 — are brati in England with those of the hyena and caye-bear, w 
i gn the period of their intermixture. 
