648 Proceedings. 



Mr. Smith, our highest authority, helieves 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 eai'liest 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, came 

 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 imjjlements, arrived at 

 last, at a depth of from 33 to 50 feet from the surface, at the original debris 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 vi^ere again succeeded by Greeks. Animated by these discoveries, 

 Schliemann arranged for further searching for Homer's heroes, and has, at Mycenae, 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 liiad, but only as used for arrow-heads ; thus, whilst much which was accounted 

 "history" can be proved to be fiction, there seems every probability that, in song, we 

 thall 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 Egy^Dt, 

 Chaldea, Greece, Eome— 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 sources whence light could be obtained as to the ways and means of 

 prehistoric or early man ; the importance of the discoveries thus made caused Kanke, the 

 first of living German historians, when bringing out three years ago a second edition of 

 his Prussian history 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 anthroj^ology, as it has been termed, is — When, 

 oeologically speaking, did man ajDpear 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 from certain countries, and even from the face of the earth. The wolf, the 

 beaver, the reindeer inhabited the British Isles within dates which are fixable; but, 

 though mau's bones are found in England with those of the hyena and cave-bear, we 

 lose iju:sclves when trying to assign the period of their intermixture. 



