inscriptions was found. There is not a single geologist who does not at once infer from these facts an enormous lapse of time during which the human race must have inhabited Egypt. Geologists are not more deficient in common sense than other men, and they are quite ready to allow that accidental circumstances may have contributed to bury some articles deeper than others; and their conclusions are not drawn from this or that experiment, but from the cumulative evidence derived from nearly a hundred experiments made over a very extensive area of land.

In reply to the objection that the artificial objects might have fallen into old wells which had afterwards been filled up, Sir Charles Lyell says: "Of the ninetyfive shafts and borings, seventy or more were made far from the sites of towns or villages; and allowing that every field may have had its well, there would be small chance of the borings striking upon the site even of a small number of them in seventy experiments."

I remember being once asked about these operations, and when I had described them, one of my friends came up to me and said in a voice of solemn warning and protest, "If what you have been saying is true, Christianity is a mere fable." I could only reply, "No; it only shows that your conception of Christianity involves something fabulous." Whatever claim a

1 "Antiquity of Man," p. 38, 1873.

religion may have to a divine authority, that claim cannot be extended to its theology, which is nothing else but a system of reasoning upon two sets of data, namely, those furnished by the religion itself, and those furnished by the science of the day. Biblical chronology as understood by Usher, Petavius or other learned men, depends not upon the Bible only, but also upon the data of profane chronology as understood in their days, and the latter chronology was built in great part upon statements of Greek and Latin writers which at the present day are known to be absolutely worthless.

Egyptian Ethnology.

The boring instruments which had to be employed at great depths in the operations of which I have been speaking, necessarily brought up everything in fragments. There is therefore no proof that the Egyptians known to us from history were descended from the pre-historic men whose existence was first brought to light by these operations. But the very proximate probability of such a descent might have suggested itself to ethnologists, who have persisted in looking for the ancestors of the Egyptians among races the very existence of which cannot be traced very far back. At all events, the view is now entirely abandoned according to which the Egyptians came down the Nile from

the more southern regions of Africa. It has been most conclusively proved that they gradually advanced from north to south, and the earliest Ethiopian civilization is demonstrably the child, not the parent, of the Egyptian. Most scholars now point to the interior of Asia as the cradle of the Egyptian people. I will only say that the farther back we go into antiquity, the more closely does the Egyptian type approach the European. This is the opinion of Mariette Bey and of Dr. Birch, and the same opinion was most powerfully expressed by Professor Owen at the Oriental Congress held in London in 1874. In reference to one specimen, Professor Owen said: "With English costume and complexion, this Egyptian of the Ancient Empire would pass for a well-to-do sensible British citizen and ratepayer." And of another he said: "The general character of the face recalls that of the northern German; he might be the countryman of Bismarck." In reference to another hypothesis which had been proposed, he observed: "Unknown and scarce conceivable as are the conditions which could bring about the conversion of the Australian into the Egyptian type of skull, the influence of civilization and admixture would be still more impotent in blotting out the dental characteristics of the lower race. The size of crown and multiplication of fangs are reduced in the ancient Egyptian to the standard of Indo-European or so-called highly civi

lized races. of size."1

The last molar has the same inferiority

Language.

It is in vain, I believe, that the testimony of philology has been invoked in evidence of the origin of the Egyptians. The language which has been recovered belongs to a very early stage of speech, and is not, or at least cannot be shown to be, allied to any other known language than its descendant the Coptic. It is certainly not akin to any of the known dialects either of North or of South Africa, and the attempts which have hitherto been made towards establishing such a kindred must be considered as absolute failures. A certain number of Egyptian words, such as i, "go," tā, "give, place," have the same meaning as the corresponding Indo-European roots. And a few other Egyptian words sound very like Semitic words of the same meaning. But the total number of words in the Egyptian vocabulary which have the appearance of relationship either with the Aryan or with the Semitic stock turns out, after passing through the necessary process of sifting, to be extremely small. A consider

1 Transactions of the Second Session of the International Congress of Orientalists, held in London, 1874, p. 355 and following. Professor Owen here discusses the doctrine put forth by Professor Huxley upon "the Geographical Distribution of the chief Modifications of Mankind," in the Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, Jan. 1871.

able number of words have certainly passed from one language into another, but all these have to be deducted. Those who talk of Egyptian having its root in Semitic, or say that its grammar is Semitic, must mean something quite different from what these words imply in the mouth of some one well versed in the science of Language. I once heard a learned Jew compare Hebrew with Portuguese. All that he meant to say was, that it preferred the letter m where the kindred languages took n, as the Portuguese language often does in contrast with its sister languages, the Spanish, French and Italian. And those who speak of Egyptian grammar as being Semitic are clearly thinking of some peculiarities of it, in forgetfulness of very much more important ones. It would be quite easy, under such conditions, to discover Finnish or Polynesian affinities.

The Egyptian and the Semitic languages belong to quite different stages of language, the former to what Professor Max Müller calls the second or Terminational, the latter to the third or Inflexional stage. In the Terminational stage, two or more roots may coalesce to form a word, the one retaining its radical independence, the other sinking down to a mere termination. languages belonging to this stage have generally been called agglutinative. Now the Egyptian language has indeed reached this stage as regards the pronominal and one or two other suffixes. But in all other respects it most nearly resembles the languages of the first or

The