108 MAN: 



be some germs of truth in their dynasties and epochs, 

 but clearly they can form no foundation for rational 

 convictions respecting man's antiquity, and merely 

 impress us with a vague idea of the vast time that 

 Eastern Asia has been peopled by civilised races. 

 We say the vast time that Eastern Asia has been peopled, 

 for if observers like the missionary fathers have been 

 constrained to admit a veritable antiquity to Chinese 

 records of five or six thousand years, what shall be 

 said to the ages that must have preceded these muni- 

 ments, and during which the race was gradually work- 

 ing its way upward from nomadic barbarism to a 

 position of settled industry, and to the establishment 

 of complicated social and ethical systems 1 Nor can 

 much more be said iu favour of the astronomical re- 

 cord of the Chaldees. Carrying us backward in time 

 some tliree or four hundred thousand years, it seems in- 

 capable of verification by modem astronomers, and we 

 can only receive it as a vague corroboration of the high 

 antiquity of the human race in the region to which it 

 refers. Even were it reliable, it gives no indication of 

 the successional stages of man's advancement, nor does 

 it lead, any more than the chronologies of the Chinese 

 and Hindoos, to the faintest conception of a rational 

 beginning for our race. And yet we cannot help re- 

 marking that these time-records, wide and uncertain 

 as they are, seem more in accordance with the vasti- 



