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inches of mud on the surface ! And we are to regard all this as sober 
science, destined to lead us to greatly ‘ advanced religious views,’ and as far 
beyond the teachings of Moses as the 1 educated classes ’ could wish to be 
ahead of the common multitude ! "We have had to read Sir Charles’s state- 
ments over and over many times in order to believe our own eyes that he 
had really published to the world such monstrous examples of speculation. 
And yet such is the fact ; with the solemn gravity of a high priest of 
science he spreads out his marvellous cogitations, and satisfies, too, the 
credulous souls, who will trust anything rather than the Bible, that man has 
been on the earth for hundreds of thousands of years ! 
“ Let us just take one fact adduced by Sir Charles Lyell himself, and one 
which is pregnant with force against these reckless speculations. Speaking 
of a fossil bone which was found near Natchez, he says : — ‘ Owing to the 
destructible nature of the yellow loam, every streamlet flowing over the plat- 
form has cut for itself, in its way to the Mississippi, a deep gully or ravine.’ 
He mentions one of these ravines which is seven miles long, and in some 
places sixty feet deep, which had no existence before 1812. There was an 
earthquake at that date which shook the land all about Natchez, and so far 
accounted for some of those fissures that had been cut so deeply ; but Sir 
Charles saw when he was there that the streams were widening and deepen- 
ing all their channels, and consequently carrying immense quantities of mud 
into the river, which was in its turn bearing it on to its delta in the Gulf of 
Mexico. Yet he could coolly calculate that all this would allow of only 
something less than the fiftieth part of an inch of sediment laid on the 
surface of that delta in an average year ! ” 
If any one wished for an exemplification how one part of 
the writings of Sir Charles Lyell may be brought to contra- 
dict another, and how his facts controvert his theories, I 
would refer him to this masterly little book of Professor Kirk's 
which I have just quoted. 
I cannot pass from my present subject of the great anti- 
quity assumed for Egyptian civilization without referring to 
an instance in which that antiquity was sought to be proved 
on the strict scientific grounds of astronomical demonstration, 
and how it melted away before an accurate investigation. On the 
ceiling of the portico, and also on the ceiling of one of the 
apartments of the large temple at Denderah, in Upper Egypt, 
the best preserved and one of the most splendid of Egyptian 
ruins, the French savants supposed that they recognized the 
signs of the Zodiac. 
“ Dupuy and other French writers assumed from the relative position of 
those Zodiacal signs, and their connection with the precession of the equi- 
noxes, that the astronomical observations upon which these Zodiacs were 
constructed, must refer to a date far more ancient than that recorded for the 
