onuments of Egypt, or the geologist who interprets the
earth's autobiography, should arrive at views respecting the date of an
ancient empire, or the age of our planet, irreconcilable with every one
of these numerous and conflicting chronologies? The want of agreement
amongst the learned in regard to the probable date of the deluge of Noah
is a source of far greater perplexity and confusion than our extreme
uncertainty as to the epoch of the creation,--the deluge being a
comparatively modern event, from which the repeopling of the earth and
the history of the present races of mankind is made to begin.

Naturalists have long felt that to render probable the received opinion
that all the leading varieties of the human family have originally
sprung from a single pair, (a doctrine against which there appears to me
to be no sound objection,) a much greater lapse of time is required for
the slow and gradual formation of races, (such as the Caucasian,
Mongolian, and Negro,) than is embraced in any of the popular systems of
chronology. The existence of two of those marked varieties above
mentioned can be traced back 3000 years before the present time, or to
the painting of pictures, preserved in the tombs or on the walls of
buried temples in Egypt. In these we behold the Negro and Caucasian
physiognomies portrayed as faithfully and in as strong contrast as if
the likenesses of those races had been taken yesterday. When we consider
therefore the extreme slowness of the changes, which climate and other
modifying causes have produced in modern times, we must allow for a vast
series of antecedent ages, in the course of which the long-continued
influence of similar external circumstances gave rise to peculiarities,
probably increased in many successive generations, until they were fixed
by hereditary transmission. The characteristic forms and features thus
acquired by certain tribes, may have been afterwards diffused by
migration from a few centres over wide continental spaces. The theory,
therefore, that all the races of man have come from one common stock
receives support from every investigation which forces us to expand our
ideas of the duration of past time, or which multiplies the number of
years that have passed away since the origin of man. Hitherto, geology
has neither enlarged nor circumscribed the "human period;" but simply
proved that in the history of animated nature it is comparatively
modern, or the last of a long seri