tions made by the Egyptians, ten thousand years
before the days of Adam! So beautiful is the consistency of Infidel
science. But when you inquire into the source of their knowledge of the
philosophy of the ancients, you discover that they did not draw it from
the writings of Moses, of which they betray the grossest ignorance, nor
of any one who lived within a thousand years of Moses' time. Voltaire is
their authority for all such matters. He transferred to the early
Asiatics all the absurdities of the later Greek philosophers, and would
have us believe that Moses, who wrote before these Greeks had learned to
read, was indebted to them for his philosophy. Of the learning of the
ancient patriarchs Voltaire does not tell them much, for a satisfactory
reason.

Yet it might not have required much learning to infer, that the eyes,
and ears, and nerves of men who lived ten times as long as we can, must
have been more perfect than ours; that a man who could observe nature
with such eyes, under a sky where Stoddart now sees the ring of Saturn,
the crescent of Venus, and the moons of Jupiter, with the naked
eye,[298] and continue his observations for eight hundred years, would
certainly acquire a better knowledge of the appearance of things than
any number of generations of short-lived men, called away by death
before they have well learned how to observe, and able only to leave the
shell of their discoveries to their successors; that unless we have some
good reason for believing that the mind of man was greatly inferior,
before the flood, to what it is now, the antediluvians must have made a
progress in the knowledge of the physical sciences, during the three
thousand years which elapsed from the creation to the deluge, much
greater than the nations of Europe have effected since they began to
learn their A, B, C, about the same number of years ago; and that though
Noah and his sons might not have preserved all the learning of their
drowned contemporaries, they would still have enough to preserve them
from the reproach of ignorance and barbarism; at least until their sons
have succeeded in building a larger ship than the ark, or a monument
equal to the Great Pyramid. The Astronomer Royal of Scotland[299] has
demonstrated, that in this imperishable monument, erected four thousand
years ago, the builders, who took care to keep it alone, of all the
buildings of Egypt, free from idolatrous images or inscriptions,
recorded with most l