ceeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and more 
interesting still, a belief in a. future state, to times long anterior 
to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious as 
may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved, 
by cherishing hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of 'noble,' 
which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to 
himself as the primitive condition of our race — 
1 As nature first made man, 
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.' 
While thus endeavouring to extend the period of man's 
sojourn upon the earth to a more remote epoch than the 
one usually received ; for which we have abundant collateral 
evidence, I am by no means advocating the supposition 
of a Pre-Adamite race, which is both unnecessary and 
unwise. The argument that the earliest historical docu- 
ments and monumental remains attest a higher state of 
civilization than man could be supposed to have arrived 
at, so soon after his creation, carries no weight with it. 
In the first place we have no definite knowledge of what 
ages may have elapsed between man's advent and the 
erection of those stupendous edifices, whose remains have 
come down to us ; and secondly, it presupposes that a low and 
more barbarous form of the human family were first called 
into being, who were in time replaced by the more highly 
organized and more amply endowed race of which we are 
the descendants ; we are expressly told in the simple, but 
explicit language of Scripture, that man was the last created, 
and the most perfect in mental and physical powers, to have 
dominion over every living thing upon the earth, and as 
such it was only necessary for him to have an infancy or 
educational period to pass through before arriving at that 
state of civilization to which all seem to point for the 
first few generations. I would, therefore, venture to ask, is. 
it not as rational to suppose that man commenced his 
