314 VARIETIES OF MAN REPRESENTED 



bable history of some of them seems still to reach up to a 

 period too remote to be reconciled with the short chronology 

 of TJsher and Petavius. This has been so universally felt 

 by all those writers who have entered on the investigation 

 of primeval history that it is superfluous to dwell upon 

 the subject/'* 



Baron Bunsen, one of the ablest among those who regard 

 the various forms of language as having had a common 

 origin, is forced to claim for the human race an antiquity of 

 at least 20,000 years. Again, the ingenious author of " The 

 Genesis of the Earth and of Man,"f says truly that "one 

 of the greatest of the difficulties that beset us when we 

 endeavour to account for the commonly supposed descent of 

 all mankind from a single pair, .... lies in the fact 

 of our finding, upon Egyptian monuments, mostly of the 

 thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries before the 

 Christian era, representations of individuals of numerous 

 nations, African, Asiatic, and European, differing in phy- 

 sical characteristics as widely as any equal number of nations 

 of the present age that could be grouped together ; among 

 these being negroes, of the true Nigritian stamp, depicted 

 with a fidelity, as to colour and features, hardly to be sur- 

 passed by an accomplished modern artist. That such diver- 

 sities had been produced by natural means in the interval 

 between that remote age and the time of Noah, probably no 

 one versed in the sciences of anatomy and physiology will 

 consider credible/' and he concludes, therefore, that the 

 human race cannot have been derived from a single pair. 

 For, just as the philological difficulties will not, of course, 

 affect those who accept literally the account given in our 

 English version of the miraculous creation of languages at 

 the Tower of Babel; so in the same way "the shortness 



* Prichard. Researches into the Physical History of Mankimi. Vol. v,, p. 553*. 

 f Up. 117. 



