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far as we can judge, must have needed centuries for its 
development. The division of human races, whose formation 
from the original pair, our philosophy teaches us, must also 
have required an immense and unknown extent of time. 
We traverse the regions to which both the comparison of 
languages and the Biblical record assign the original birth- 
place of mankind, — the country of the Euphrates and the 
plateau of Eastern Asia. Buried kingdoms are revealed 
to us ; the shadowy outlines of magnificent cities appear 
which flourished and fell before recorded human history, 
and of which Herodotus never heard. Art and science are 
unfolded, reaching far back into the past. The signs of 
luxury and splendour are uncovered from the ruins of ages, 
but, remote as is the date of those Turanian and Semitic 
Empires — almost equalling that of the flood in the ordinary 
system, of chronology — they cannot be near the origin of 
things, and a long process of development must have passed 
ere they reached the maturity in which they are revealed to us. 
The Chinese records give us an antiquity and an acknowledged 
date before the time of Abraham, (if we follow the received 
chronology), and even then their language must have been as 
it is now, distinct and solidified, betraying to the scholar 
no certain affinity to any other family of languages. 
Indian history, so long boasted of for its immense antiquity, 
is without doubt the most modern of the ancient 
records, and offers no certain date beyond 1800 B. C. 
In Europe, the earliest evidences of man disclosed by 
our investigations are even more vague and shadowy. 
Probably, without antedating in time these historical re- 
cords of Asia, they reach back to a more primitive and 
barbarous age. The earliest history of Europe is not studied 
from inscriptions or manuscript, or even monument. It is 
not like the Asiatic, a conscious work of the people leaving 
a memorial of itself to a future age. It is rather like 
