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to regard human society as a new institution, he 

 is more powerfully interested by remembrances 

 of times past. These remembrances were not 

 indeed of a distant date ; but in all that is mo- 

 numental antiquity is a relative idea, and we 

 easily confound what is ancient with what is 

 obscure and problematic. The Egyptians con- 

 sidered the historical remembrances of the 

 Greeks as very recent. If the Chinese, or, as 

 they prefer calling themselves, the inhabitants of 

 the celestial empire, could have communicated 

 with the priests of Heliopolis, they would have 

 smiled at those pretensions of the Egyptians to 

 antiquity. Contrasts not less striking are found 

 in the north of Europe and of Asia, in the New 

 World, and in every region, where the human 

 race has not preserved a long consciousness of 

 itself. The migration of the Toltecks, the most 

 ancient historical event on the table-land of 

 Mexico, dates only in the sixth age of our sera. 

 The introduction of a good system of intercala- 

 tion, and the reform of the calendars, the indis- 

 pensable basis of an accurate chronology, took 

 place in the year 1091. These epochas, which 

 to us appear so modern, fall on fabulous times, 

 when we reflect on the history of our species 

 between the banks of the Oroonoko and the 

 Amazon. We there see symbolic figures sculp- 

 tured on the rocks, but no tradition throws 

 light upon their origin. In the hot part of 



