2 GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 



calendars in use, each day is recorded as it passes; and by this means 

 mainly, the dates of historical events have been preserved. This 

 practice has been kept up from more remote antiquity tlian is com- 

 monly supposed : the Egyptians knowing the year in which every one 

 of their principal buildings was commenced, as certainly as men of the 

 present generation know the year of the battles of the last ten centu- 

 ries. In a Desert climate that guards the work of human hands, the 

 dates of all the principal events in liistory are probably recoverable, up 

 to the days of Menes, eight hundred years before the building of the 

 largest Egyptian pyramid, and very nearly six thousand years ago. 

 Already in the days of Menes, the human fiimily was far from being 

 in the state of primeval simplicity : there were armies in martial array ; 

 military campaigns in foreign lands; an aristocracy scheming; the 

 medical profession, and the trade in drugs; gold-washing and jewels; 

 an established judiciary ; a priesthood; a crowded population at home; 

 the linen manufacture; and the full complement of the manifold 

 employments, arts, and trades of advanced civilized society. 



By means of the characters in use in writing, we can go yet further 

 back in history ; to that anterior epoch when they were selected. 

 These characters, termed hieroglyphic, represent the implements, the 

 familiar animals and plants, the monotheism, the associations, and 

 placed in a certain order of arrangement, make up the drama of 

 Bedouin life. And here all human records end. 



The figures of the animals and plants in hieroglyphic characters, and 

 in paintings and sculptures extant from the century preceding the 

 building of the Great Pyramid, afford abundant evidence, that, during 

 this long interval, no change has taken place in the system of species : 

 the hyena, the Capricorn, the hedgehog, the house-sparrow, the barn- 

 owl, the red-legged partridge of six thousand years ago, were precisely 

 the same animals as at the present day. 



After examining the historical records along the river-valley of the 

 Nile, let the traveller walk out into the Eastern Desert. Its surface is 

 strewed with fossil timber; blocks are in- sight that Menes may have 

 stumbled over when he first led an army out of Egypt, and the last 

 six thousand years are but as a day. Anterior, then, to the existing 

 system of species, there was a period of time when there were rains 

 and forests in the North African Desert. 



Even in America, we can look upon objects belonging to this Ante- 

 rior Period : upon morasses that contain the skeletons of mired masto- 



