Man and the Glacial Period. 193 
step farther. The story of Egypt, as now understood, carries us 
back at least forty centuries before the Christian epoch. At that 
time, Egypt was no nation of half-civilized men, still less, of 
barbarians, but she possessed a stable government, a wide influ- 
ence, and above all, the art of writing in a rudimentar}' form. 
The slow progress that was made in early times, compels us 
to believe, that such a condition argues not a few centuries of 
preceding development from savagery, either in the valley of 
the Nile or elsewhere. When the necessary addition is made to 
Egyptian chronology for this reason, we are almost driven to the 
admission that that empire may have been in existence, though 
infantine, while the glacial sheet was yet lingering over North 
America, if not over northern Europe. Neolithic man may yet 
be traced back to the valley of the Nile, and the dark continent 
may prove to have been the mother and the nurse of civilization 
and the arts. 
The difl^erentiation of the varieties of the human family at so 
early a date, as shown by the monuments, proves that in times so 
distant the race was ethnically nearly' as it is now. The ante- 
Egyptian era must therefore on this ground have been long. 
Without taking an extreme view, time must have been one of the 
potent factors in the differentiation and distribution of man. 
Accepting then the comparative recenc}' of the ice-age, and 
the antiquity of man chronologicall}', it is difficult to find good 
antecedent ground for rejecting evidence in favor of glacial or 
inter-glacial or even pre-glacial man. All such evidence, must of 
course, l)e most carefully sifted, as it has been in Europe, but we 
cannot see any reasonable ground for the excessive perturbation 
of spirit which some archteologists and geologists have shown 
over a l)rief summary of tiie facts, as already accepted by many. 
Only the devout believer in the special creation of man without 
any organic or genetic connection with his "poor relations," so- 
called, need be at all excited over the Tuscarawas flint and other 
"finds." Whether paheolithic or not, we will not en([uire. This 
distinction has not yet crystallized here as in Europe and especially 
in England. Those who adopt the evolutionary belief in man's 
origin will see in this and other similar instances merely what was 
to be expected, and the onl}' (luestion to be solved will be — Did 
man in America advance from ver}' early and rude conditions to 
those of historic times, or did he migrate at a later stage from 
