HIS HISTORICAL RELATIONS. 115 



extract them and fashion them into implements and 

 machinery. But he is also an inventor of intellectual 

 tools — of social, political, and religious schemes, by 

 which he secures his safety and progress; and as these 

 schemes have presented themselves in innumerahle 

 forms on the platforms of civilised Asia, Europe, and 

 Northern Africa, and as men are especially tenacious 

 of customs and observances, and slow to accept newer 

 forms, the time required for the elaboration of these 

 must have been very long, historically speaking, and 

 prehistorically even of longer duration. In fine, 

 view it as we may, no history gives any satisfactory 

 idea of man's antiquity ; and whatever rate of pro- 

 gress we assume, the time he has been working his 

 way onwards and upwards through the various races 

 and nationalities of Asia, Northern Africa, and Europe, 

 must vastly exceed the limits of any attempted 

 chronology. 



" We may venture to assert" (says Baron Bunsen,* 

 arguing from a different stand-point, but having the 

 same chronological object in view), " without being 

 charged with temerity by competent authorities, that 

 in consequence of Eg3rptian researches, the arbitrary 

 barriers which Jewish superstition and Christian sloth 

 have erected upon God's free field of human history 

 are for ever broken down. The ordinary views as to 



* Egypt's Place in Universal History, vol. iv. p. 20. 



