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immense importance of every nation possessing an authoritative 
era for computing the records of the past, and as a guide to 
unborn generations in the future. 
2. Probably at no period has there ever been such a variety 
of conjectures concerning the age of man on earth as those put 
forth by the learned in the present day. The late Baron 
Bunsen contended that “man existed on earth about 20,000 
B.C., and that there is no valid reason for assuming a more 
remote beginning of our race.'” * Mr. Jukes, a distinguished 
English geologist, places the age of man at 100,000 years. 
Professor Fiihlro tli affirms in his work, “Der fossile Mensch 
aus dem Neanderthal,” that “it reaches back to a period of 
from 200,000 to 300,000 years.” Dr. Hunt, the late President 
of the Anthropological Society, not content with the compara- 
tively modest chronology of the Brahmins, which allows the 
human race an antiquity of 4,300,000 years, according to Sir 
"William Jones, affirms that man has really existed on earth for 
the prolonged period of 9,000,000 years ! While Professor 
Huxley, though cautiously declining to commit himself by 
naming a definite number of years, having affirmed in his 
lecture “ On the Fossil Remains of Man,” that the human race 
was existing “ when a tropical Fauna and Flora flourished in 
our Northern clime,” i.e. during the Carboniferous era, we 
might fairly credit his theory concerning the antiquity of man 
with 9 or even 90,000,000 of years ! Indeed, in his speech at 
the Norwich meeting of the British Association, he asked his 
audience if the distribution of the different types of skulls did 
not “ point to a vastly remote time when the distant localities, 
between which there now rolls a vast ocean, were parts of one 
tropical continent ? And if so, does it not throw back the 
appearance of man on the globe to an era immeasurably more 
remote than has ever yet been assigned to it by the boldest 
speculators ? ” f 
3. I need scarcely point out not only the extreme variety of 
these conjectures, but also the extreme want of anything like 
reason to induce our acceptance of them. The learned of 
* Egypt's Place in Universal History , iii. xxviii. 
f A French speculator boldly declares that “The horse was killed and 
eaten in Europe before having been made a domestic animal for the use of 
man, from the commencement of the quaternary (i.e. the post tertiary) up 
to the period termed the age of bronze ; that is to say, during a period 
which cannot be estimated less than 300,000 years .” — Lcs Origines du 
Cheval domestique, par C. A. Pietrement, quoted by M. Chabas in his 
Etudes stir V Antiquite Historique, d'apres lcs Sources Egyptian) cs, pp. 1,2, 
