picture, unequalled for simplicity and
dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they
are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but
belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of _Time_
is not at all directly treated in them.

We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a
most ancient civilization,--the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we
search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal
records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand
relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the
embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a
date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before
us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the
childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have
needed centuries for its development, and the divisions of human races,
whose formation from the original pair our philosophy teaches us must
have required immense and unknown spaces of time,--all as distinct as
they are at the present day.

We traverse the regions to which both the comparison of languages and
the Biblical records assign the original birthplace of mankind,--the
country of the Euphrates and the plateau of Eastern Asia. Buried
kingdoms are revealed to us; the shadowy outlines of magnificent cities
appear which flourished and fell before recorded human history, and of
which even Herodotus never heard; Art and Science are unfolded, reaching
far back into the past; the signs of luxury and splendor are uncovered
from the ruin of ages: but, remote as is the date of these Turanian and
Semitic empires, almost equalling that of the Flood in the ordinary
system of chronology, they cannot be near the origin of things, and
a long process of development must have passed ere they reached the
maturity in which they are revealed to us.

The Chinese records give us an antiquity and an acknowledged date before
the time of Abraham, (if we follow the received chronology,) and
even then their language must have been, as it is now, distinct and
solidified, betraying to the scholar no certain affinity to any other
family of language. The Indian history, so long boasted of for its
immense antiquity, is without doubt the most modern of the ancient
records, and offers no certain date beyond 1800 B.C.

In Europe, the earliest e