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being perfect in all necessary knowledge from the hand 
of his Maker, and that by degrees after the fall some por- 
tions of the human family degenerated into a state of semi- 
barbarism as they spread into distant parts of the earth ? 
Just as we know to take place in the human family at 
the present day, when left to the unrestrained indulgence 
of their passions, and removed from civilized life and 
the effects and influence of education. These early and 
degenerated races were probably the fabricators of the 
rude implements now exhumed, who had to combat with 
the Camivora, huge Pachyderms and Herbivora of the 
same age, in the Darwinian struggle for life. But who 
will dare to define this remote period? which doubtless 
dates countless ages before the earliest written records, 
all of which are comparatively modern, and throw no 
rays of light upon these primaeval people and their 
histories, which are alike veiled in the obscurity of the past. 
A modern writer ably illustrates this where he says : — " We 
turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records, but we soon 
discover that though containing a picture, unequalled for 
simplicity and dignity, of the earliest experiences of the 
present family of men, they are by no means a monument or 
relic of the most remote period, but belong to a compara- 
tively modern date, and the question of time is not at all 
directly treated in them. We visit the region where poetry and 
myth, and tradition, have placed an ancient civilization — 
Egypt. We search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history 
written in funeral records, in kingly genealogies, in inscrip- 
tions, and in the thousand relics preserved of domestic 
life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the embalmed remains 
of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a time 
far beyond any received date of history, and still we have 
before us a ripened civilization, an art which could not 
belong to the childhood of a race, a language which, as 
