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so much of a theoretical character about it, that though I do not deny there 
is a considerable substratum of historical truth, a great deal of it is mere 
unproven speculation. I feel the greatest interest in all that is connected 
with Egyptian history, and I should like to know what has been the result of 
the attempt to decipher the new tri-lingual stone which has recently been 
discovered in Egypt. I should like to know whether it has at all enlarged 
our power of deciphering hieroglyphic inscriptions. But I maintain that the 
very character of the earliest hieroglyphs themselves presupposes that the 
Egyptian race possessed a considerable degree of civilization from the earliest 
times. (Hear, hear.) 
Mr. Reddie. — I did not quite mean what Mr. Row supposes I did by 
monumental evidence. I was not referring simply to the interpretations of 
the hieroglyphs. I have very little faith in them, and I find that Sir George 
Cornewall Lewis gives little credit to them. I was referring to the 
proofs which the existence of the monuments of antiquity themselves afford 
of the anterior civilization of the people who constructed them. There are a 
great many instances of this kind in Central America ; and some of the most 
recent discoveries, even in North America, go to prove that a race more 
civilized than the Red man (who was once supposed to have been the original 
American) had existed where the Red man was afterwards found. But the 
whole of this question has already been discussed by us at some length. I 
read a paper myself, both here and before the British Association, on the 
subject ; and I go further than Mr. Row as to the negative and positive 
proofs of anterior civilization ; for I maintain not only that savage races have 
never civilized themselves, but that among the most degraded races, almost 
without exception, you will find what I call monumental traces of a previous 
civilization. And you must not altogether throw over traditions and myths. 
You need not believe in the myth itself ; but the very existence of an 
ingeniously constructed story is evidence that the people among whom you 
find it handed down were originally equal to the task of constructing it ; and 
when they have such stories, and cannot invent them now, that itself forms 
an argument that their ancestors were superior to them 
Mr. Row. — I do not believe a myth, but I quite admit that a myth may be 
evidence of something else. 
Mr. Reddie. — I called attention to this matter in our first session, and 
then alluded to the fact that Mr. Pritchard, the consul in the Fiji Islands, 
who had lived there so long as to be almost a Fijian himself, gives an account 
of the stories current among those people which are quite Homeric in their 
character. Those stories are handed down among the people, not by a written 
literature, but from mouth to mouth, and repeated just as the raconteurs of 
the Continent, or the story-tellers of the middle ages, used to tell their stories. 
Mr. Pritchard’s account of these Fijian stories is published in the memoirs of 
the Anthropological Society, and they go far to prove that those people have 
descended from an ancestry infinitely superior to themselves. We have not 
only no proof that savages have ever raised themselves to civilization ; but 
Sir Samuel Baker goes even farther than that, and bears testimony to the 
