206 



in a language utterly lost ; so that no intelligible record survives of 

 the annals, origin, or social condition of these highly cultured peoples, 

 nor yet of their more famous predecessors, if not indeed founders, the 

 Phoenicians, who for more than 1500 years after the dispersion from 

 Shinar unceasingly extended their arts, religion, and literature, to all 

 shores accessible by their enterprise and commerce. The testimony of 

 a Roman historian may here be aptly introduced in illustration. The 

 populous state of the Veientes, renowned and powerful long before 

 Rome was founded ("Civitas antiquissima Italise atque ditissima," 

 Eutropius, 1. i., s. 19), had been utterly destroyed by the arms of the ad- 

 vancing Republic, 399 B. C. ; and Elorus, only 500 years after, in the 

 reign of Trajan, thus apostrophizes the Veientes — " Euisse quis 

 meminit ? Quae reliquiae, quodve vestigium ? Laborat annaliuin fides, 

 ut Veios fuisse credamus."* Within the short space of five centuries, 

 and in a comparatively civilized era, oblivion had swept away every 

 vestige of this renowned Etruscan people, so that even their former ex- 

 istence seemed dubious, and their magnificent cities, like Yeii, as if they 

 never had been. 



As for the guesses of those sciolists, who, regardless of the Divine 

 afflatus which constituted man " a living soul" (Gen. ii. 7), if not like- 

 wise of his distinctive organic structure, have invented the priscan, alias 

 pithecoid man, for the purpose of demonstrating the pre-Adamite anti- 

 quity of the human family — pronouncing a solitary exceptional instance 

 of an abnormal skull (it may be idiot or cretin) to be the type of a species, 

 and thus rounding off the transmutation series from Mollusc to Man at 

 the superior end — now, in Australia, if anywhere, the missing link 

 might be confidently sought ; for there the aboriginal Papuan presents 

 the most debased form of the human organism ; yet it so happens that 

 the Simise are not found, either indigenous or fossil, the Eauna of that 

 region indicating a geologic era many thousand years anterior to their 

 appearance on our globe. It is difficult to believe that Anthropologists 

 are really in earnest in propounding this strange theory ; however, there 

 is no accounting for tastes, and the pride of ancient ancestry sometimes 

 assumes an amusing perversion. The Simian advocates may easily test 

 the conditions of their fantastic thesis by organizing an expedition to 

 the banks of the Gaboon, 



" Where wild in woods the noble savage runs" 



not for the purpose of skinning their hirsute cousins, like Hanno, or du 

 Chaillu, but of introducing social reform, and educating them up to their 

 own standard of rational accountability. Doubtless the civilized Orsons of 

 Gorilla Land would hereafter move respectably on all-fours in anthro- 

 pomorphological circles, and in due time be enabled to enlighten their 

 scientific patrons and the public on the genealogy and habits of pithe- 

 coid or priscan man. 



*1. i. c 12. 



