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of Bacon have been disregarded ; that when that science is 
freed from the fetters of “ feigned hypotheses/’’ it tends to 
prove the accuracy and truthfulness of Moses : — 
Lastly, that the great divergence between some professors 
of science and the clergy, produced in reality by the denial of 
creation, arises from no true progress of science. That it has 
been caused by the importation of the rationalistic principles 
of Strauss into the domain of physical science. That it 
rests on no philosophical basis, and is only the product of 
imaginary hypotheses unfounded on fact. The first question 
I propose to investigate is the scientific evidence adduced in 
support of a far higher antiquity for the human race than any 
that can be derived from Holy Writ. 
According to Hales’s chronology, man was created 7,279 
years ago, and according to Ussher 5,872 years only have 
elapsed since that event. The discrepancy between these two 
distinguished chronologists may be taken as a proof how very 
difficult it must be to derive an accurate chronology from the 
data given in the Bible. It is asserted, however, that there 
is good scientific evidence to show that civilized man has 
existed in Egypt 30,000 years, and that man inhabited the 
banks of the Mississippi 50,000 years before the present time. 
Surely, we are told, it must be admitted that no stretching of 
the Bible chronology can be made to include such vast 
periods. 
Sir Gharles Ly ell’s Antiquity of Man is so extremely vague 
in its statements of the scientific methods by which this great 
antiquity is arrived at that we must have recourse to some 
more definite authority to investigate the scientific value of 
the methods by which this problem is determined. In the 
Philosophical Transactions for 1855 there is a paper by Mr. 
Leonard Horner, Vice-President of the Royal Society, and 
Vice-President of the Geological Society, in which he seeks 
to prove, by strictly scientific methods, that civilized man 
existed in Egypt 13,371 years before a.d. 1854. He states, — 
“ In accordance with the opinion I entertained when I undertook the 
inquiry that excavations should be made in the vicinity of some very ancient 
monument, the age of which is known, I chose the site of the long-extinct 
city of Memphis, now covered with the date-groves of the modern village of 
Metrahenny, twenty miles above the parallel of Heliopolis, and about thirty 
miles above the apex of the Delta. All testimony appears to concur as to its 
very remote antiquity, in assigning its foundation to Menes, the first king 
of the first dynasty which reigned over Egypt, and who, according to Lepsius, 
the latest and very able expounder of Egyptian chronology, began his reign 
3,892 years before the Christian era.” 
