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AN ESSAY 
 
 PRIMEVAL HISTORY, 
 
AN ESSAY 
 
 PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 
 
 JOHN KENRICK, M.A. 
 
 Ambagibus MYI 
 Obtegitur densa caligine mersa vetustas. 
 
 Stilus It aliens. 
 
 LONDON: 
 B. EELLOWES, LUDGATE STEEET. 
 
 M.DCCC.XLVI. 
 
iosdos; 
 
 richard kinder, printer, 
 
 oreen arbour court, old bailet. 
 
 
PREFACE, 
 
 The substance of the following Essay was intended 
 to form an Introduction to a larger work on the 
 ancient history of Egypt, Assyria, Phoenicia, and 
 the other oriental countries, whose civilization 
 constitutes the earliest series of connected histori- 
 cal facts which has come down to us. To lay the 
 foundation of such a history, it was absolutely ne- 
 cessary to inquire into the evidence of certain long- 
 established and traditionary opinions, respecting 
 the events and chronology of a preceding period, 
 comprising the interval between the origin of the 
 human race and the commencement of the special 
 history of these countries. Those who confine 
 themselves to any one ancient people are not re- 
 quired to give a judgment respecting the antiquity 
 of mankind, or the connection of their various 
 
VI PREFACE. 
 
 tribes ; those who pursue their researches upwards 
 may escape from the difficulties of primaeval his- 
 tory by breaking off, or turning aside, when they 
 find that they have reached the point at which 
 historical evidence becomes complicated with ques- 
 tions of theological opinion. Such reserve is im- 
 practicable, when we begin with the beginning, 
 and endeavour to exhibit the early history of the 
 East comprehensively, and according to the con- 
 nection of its several parts ; we must either follow 
 the authority from which such a history is usually 
 derived, or assign some reason for departing from 
 it. I found, however, that what I said, in justifi- 
 cation of my adoption of the latter course, neces- 
 sarily became more controversial than suited the 
 character of historical writing ; and I have there- 
 fore published it separately, though I am aware that 
 it still bears traces of its original destination, which 
 are not quite in accordance with its present form. 
 
 In this preliminary research into the evidence 
 of primaeval Asiatic history, it was impossible to 
 avoid an inquiry into the historical authority of 
 
PREFACE. Vii 
 
 the earliest portion of the Jewish Canon, and more 
 specifically of the first eleven chapters of the book 
 of Genesis. It is the last, and, as regards esta- 
 blished opinions, the most difficult and delicate, 
 of a series of questions, which have successively 
 forced themselves into discussion, since the inter- 
 pretation and exposition of Scripture have been 
 emancipated from the authority of the church, and 
 science and history have been independently cul- 
 tivated. Not a single century, indeed, had elapsed, 
 in which some struggle might not be traced, be- 
 tween the supposed authority of Scripture and 
 
 # 
 opinions derived from other sources. In appear- 
 ance, however, the controversy was confined within 
 the limits of Scripture itself, each party claiming 
 its sanction : it turned upon questions of meta- 
 physics and ethics — sciences whose doctrines can- 
 not be enunciated in very precise language. And 
 as the phraseology of Scripture, in reference to 
 such subjects, has that freedom and variety which 
 belongs to popular style and popular conception, 
 it was not difficult for those who held very oppo- 
 
VIU PREFACE. 
 
 site opinions, to find authority for them in the 
 same volume. 
 
 The discovery of an inconsistency between the 
 doctrines of physical astronomy and the language 
 of Scripture presented a more formidable difficulty. 
 A skilful metaphysician might undertake to recon- 
 cile free will with predestination — a skilful com- 
 mentator, St. Paul with St. James ; but to reconcile 
 the Copernican system of the universe with a 
 phraseology founded on the belief of the revolu- 
 tion of the heavenly bodies around the earth, was 
 clearly impossible. In this emergency, the head 
 of the Eomish Church was prompt in his decision, 
 and condemned the astronomer and his doctrine, 
 that no suspicion might exist of an error in the 
 language of Scripture and the long-established 
 belief of the Christian world. It was hardly worth 
 while, for such a difference, to encounter the risk 
 of placing religion in contradiction with scientific 
 evidence. For it might be said, with considerable 
 plausibility, that nothing was directly taught in 
 Scripture on the subject of astronomy ; that con- 
 
PREFACE. IX 
 
 formity, in the use of popular phrases, to an erro- 
 neous popular belief is no evidence of a participa- 
 tion in that belief, and that much inconvenience 
 must have ensued, had the scriptural writers taken 
 upon themselves to contradict and rectify the pre- 
 valent opinions of their countrymen on the struc- 
 ture and laws of the sidereal heavens. It would 
 have been equally unreasonable to expect, that they 
 should interrupt their narratives of the course of 
 Providence in patriarchal history, to explain the 
 formation of dew, or the refraction of light in the 
 rainbow. And such has been the answer usually 
 made by Protestants. 
 
 The peace thus established between theology 
 and science was first seriously threatened by the 
 modern discoveries in geology. While its foun- 
 ders were groping their way through a chaos of 
 facts, imperfectly ascertained and hastily com- 
 bined, it was held sufficient to represent Scrip- 
 ture as the safer guide ; and occasions of triumph 
 were not wanting, as one ill-constructed geologi- 
 cal hypothesis after another crumbled into ruin, 
 a 5 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Gradually, however, from this chaotic mass of 
 opinions, a scientific theory was evolved, founded 
 upon careful observations, generalized by philoso- 
 phical induction, and connected by analogies ex- 
 tending over the whole globe. Though it might 
 still be charged with impiety, it could no longer 
 be represented as crude speculation, by any one 
 who was capable of estimating its evidence and 
 process of reasoning. Of the system thus erected 
 it was a demonstrated part, that our globe was not 
 brought into the state in which man was placed 
 upon it, by a single and instantaneous act of 
 creative power; that ages of ages had elapsed 
 from the commencement to the close of this pro- 
 cess, and that the production and extinction of 
 species, in vegetable and animated nature, had 
 been going on during the greater part of this all 
 but infinite period. The cultivators of this science 
 themselves were startled at the results of their 
 own inquiries, and in no small degree perplexed, 
 how to vindicate them from the charge of contra- 
 dicting the authority of Scripture. 
 
PREFACE. XI 
 
 It is evident that the old reply will no longer 
 avail — that these writings were not designed to 
 teach us natural philosophy.* This is not a case 
 of transient allusion or acquiescence in popular 
 phraseology. It is quite clear that the intention 
 of the Hebrew writer was to teach the philosophy 
 of the universe and the history and order of 
 creation, according to the conceptions of his age. 
 They may seem to us rude and simple ; we may 
 be at a loss to reconcile them with the discoveries 
 of modern science ; but we cannot doubt that his 
 narrative was propounded and received in the full 
 belief of its truth. 
 
 Fresh difficulties have arisen with the extension 
 of other branches of knowledge. The physiologist 
 is embarrassed by the attempt to maintain at once 
 the unity of the human species, its origin from a 
 single pair, and the chronology of the Deluge, 
 
 * liKOirbs $it> Mooae? ovre (pvaioAoyrjaai oi/re aGTpovo/M?iacu ; &AA 5 
 els Oeoyuooaiav koX eirl ttjs Koap.oyovias avdpanrovs ayayeTu. Joann. 
 Philop. in Hexaemeron ap. Phot. Myriob. ccxli. This, however, 
 was not very consistent with the purpose of his work, av/j.(pwPov 
 8e7|cu to?s (paivofxtvois r\\v tov Qeaireatov Mojaecas Koafxoyoviav. 
 
Xll PREFACE. 
 
 which allows only a few centuries for the develop- 
 ment of the most marked and permanent varieties. 
 The ethnographer is equally perplexed by the 
 multitude of languages, of different roots, struc- 
 ture and analogies, which disclose themselves to 
 his research in all quarters of the globe. History 
 cannot now be confined within the narrow limits 
 which the common chronology allows, even when 
 enlarged by an arbitrary and uncritical preference 
 of the Septuagint to the Hebrew. It demands for 
 the multiplication and diffusion of mankind, the 
 progress of the arts and sciences, and the consolida- 
 tion of empires, a period far longer than the four 
 or five centuries into which these vast and gradual 
 changes have been crowded. The necessity of this 
 enlargement of the time of primaeval history may 
 not be perceived by those who are acquainted only 
 with the historical and scientific literature of 
 our own country ; but it is well known to all who 
 cultivate independently any of these branches of 
 knowledge, and have watched the progress of 
 inquiry in foreign countries, where its results are 
 
PREFACE. Xlll 
 
 made known with less of timid deference to esta- 
 blished opinion than among ourselves. Such a 
 state of things is embarrassing to science, and full 
 of danger to the interests of religion; but till 
 the difficulty is fairly acknowledged, it ban never 
 be fully met. 
 
 It is not at all removed by the reply, so often 
 repeated, that religion and science, being both true, 
 cannot be inconsistent with each other ; those who 
 make the objection, and those who give the reply, 
 do not use the same words in the same sense. 
 The objector, when he charges science with under- 
 mining religion, means that it impairs, by con- 
 tradicting, the authority of the writings on which 
 revealed religion is founded ; while the apologist, 
 if he has any very definite meaning, understands 
 by religion, those great and indestructible senti- 
 ments of the human mind, which preceded, and 
 may survive, all written records and all historical 
 evidence. 
 
 The difficulty is not fairly met by alleging, 
 that there are obscurities in all ancient writings, 
 
XIV PREFACE. 
 
 and that the high antiquity of those in ques- 
 tion makes their interpretation especially uncer- 
 tain. The apparent flexibility which Scripture 
 has exhibited in the hands of its commentators, 
 and the contradictory opinions which have been 
 deduced from it, may have led those who are 
 not conversant with Hebrew philology and bib- 
 lical hermeneutic, to suppose the meaning much 
 more uncertain than it really is. No doubt, the 
 Hebrew language and literature present greater 
 difficulties to an interpreter than those of Greece 
 and Rome. Job and Hosea are not of such sim- 
 ple and obvious construction as Homer and Euri- 
 pides. It happens, however, that the portion of 
 Scripture which relates to cosmogony and primae- 
 val history is remarkably free from philological 
 difficulties. The meaning of the writer, the only 
 thing which the interpreter has to discover and 
 set forth, is everywhere sufficiently obvious : there 
 is hardly, in these eleven chapters, a doubtful 
 construction, or a various reading of any import- 
 ance, and the English reader has, in the ordinary 
 
PREFACE. XV 
 
 version, a full and fair representation of the sense 
 of the original. The difficulties which exist arise 
 from endeavouring to harmonize the writer's in- 
 formation with that derived from other sources, or 
 to refine upon his simple language. Common 
 speech was then, as it is now, the representative 
 of the common understanding. This common 
 understanding may be confused and perplexed 
 by metaphysical cross-examination, respecting the 
 action of spirit upon matter, or of Being upon 
 nonentity, till it seems at last to have no idea 
 what creation means ; but these subtilties belong 
 no more to the Hebrew word than to the 
 English. 
 
 These remarks are rendered necessary by the 
 very vague manner in which the phrase interpre- 
 tation of Scripture is used. We are not surprised 
 to find a popular writer, like the author of the 
 Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, (p. 407,) 
 asking, " May not the sacred text, on a liberal 
 interpretation, or with the benefit of new light 
 reflected from nature or derived from learning, be 
 
XVI PREFACE. 
 
 shown to be as much in harmony with the novel- 
 ties of this volume, as it has been with geology 
 and natural philosophy?" Similar language, how- 
 ever, is held by Professor Whewell,* who cannot 
 be ignorant, that the interpretation of the Bible 
 is governed by rules as little arbitrary as that of 
 any other ancient book. In his chapter of the 
 " Relation of Tradition to Palsetiology," which 
 is really a discussion of the most advisable 
 mode of reconciling Geology and Palaeontology 
 with Scripture, he speaks repeatedly of the 
 necessity of bringing forward new interpretations 
 of Scripture, to meet the discoveries of science. 
 " When," he asks, ' ( should old interpretations 
 be given up ; what is the proper season for a 
 religious and enlightened commentator to make 
 a change in the current interpretation of sa- 
 cred Scripture ? At what period ought the es- 
 tablished exposition of a passage to be given up, 
 and a new mode of understanding the passage, such 
 
 * Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. II. ch. iv. 
 p. 147, 8, 9. 
 
PREFACE. XV11 
 
 as is or seems to be required by new discoveries 
 respecting the laws of nature, accepted in its 
 place V He elsewhere speaks* of "the language 
 of Scripture being invested with a new meaning," 
 quoting, with approbation, the sentiment of Bel- 
 larmine, that " when demonstration shall establish 
 the earth's motion, it will be proper to interpret 
 the Scriptures otherwise than they have hitherto 
 been interpreted, in those passages where mention 
 is made of the stability of the earth and move- 
 ment of the heavens." It is difficult to under- 
 stand this otherwise than as sanctioning the 
 principle, that the Commentator is to bend the 
 meaning of Scripture into conformity with the 
 discoveries of science. Such a proceeding, how- 
 ever, would be utterly inconsistent with all real 
 reverence for Scripture, and calculated to bring 
 both it and its interpreters into suspicion and 
 contempt ; and we must suppose the Author to 
 have meant, that our ideas of the authority of 
 certain portions of Scripture are to be modified, 
 * Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, Vol. Il.ch. iv.p.146. 
 
XV1U PREFACE. 
 
 when we find their obvious meaning to be at va- 
 riance with scientific truths. If this were his in- 
 tention, we must regret, that he has not expressed 
 himself with more precision, and given to a most 
 important, but obnoxious truth, the weighty sanc- 
 tion of his name. 
 
 Aoyog yap ek t a^o^ovvrujv lihv 
 
 KctK TLJV SoKOVVTlOV CtVTOQ, OV TCIVTOV G®ZVU. 
 
 Eur. Hec. 294. 
 
 Since, therefore, we can neither deny the fact 
 of a contrariety, nor remove it by any warrant- 
 able means, it is necessary that we seek some 
 other explanation of our difficulty. The credi- 
 bility of every historical writing must stand on 
 its own ground, and not only in the same volume, 
 but in the same work, materials of very different 
 authority may be included. The various portions 
 of a national history, some founded on docu- 
 mentary and contemporaneous evidence, some 
 derived from poetical sources, some from tradi- 
 tion, some treating of a period anterior to the 
 
PREFACE. XIX 
 
 invention of writing, some to the very existence 
 of the nation, and even of the human race, can- 
 not possess an uniform and equal degree of cer- 
 tainty. We cannot have the same evidence of 
 the events of the reigns of David and Solomon, 
 and those of the period comprehended in the first 
 eleven chapters of the book of Genesis ; nor can 
 we be surprised, if, in the necessary absence of 
 documents respecting primseval times, a narrative 
 should have formed itself, reflecting the opinions, 
 partly true and partly erroneous, of the people 
 among whom it had its birth. Had the Hebrew 
 literature not borne this character, the pheno- 
 menon would have been unparalleled in history; 
 it would have wanted a most decisive stamp of 
 high antiquity had it exhibited, in its earliest 
 pages, a scientific, not a popular philosophy. 
 That the Jewish people should have been so far 
 superior in religious belief, to the nations by 
 whom they were surrounded, and so much in- 
 ferior in culture and the arts of life, appears to 
 me inexplicable, except on the supposition, that 
 
XX PREFACE. 
 
 their creed had some higher origin than their own 
 speculations and inferences. It is the natural 
 consequence of this divine instruction, that their 
 early traditions should be, as we find them, more 
 pure and rational than those of their neighbours ; 
 but it does not necessarily follow, that their pri- 
 maeval chronology must be exact, or their history 
 every where free from exaggeration and miscon- 
 ception. 
 
 These opinions may be startling to many per- 
 sons, by seeming to derogate from an authority, 
 concerning which " sanctius ac reverentius visum 
 credere quam scire." Yet I believe it will be found, 
 that neither our religious feelings nor our religious 
 belief are necessarily and permanently affected, by 
 the exercise of a freer and more discriminating 
 criticism upon the Jewish records. Creation will 
 still appear to us an example and proof of omni- 
 potence, though in the limitation of its manifold 
 and progressive operations to a period of six days, 
 we trace the influence of the Jewish institution of 
 the Sabbath. Neither the impulse nor the duty 
 
PREFACE. XXI 
 
 of conjugal affection will suffer the slightest dimi- 
 nution, though we should regard the narrative of 
 the creation of the woman, rather as a simple and 
 natural expression of the relation and mutual 
 feeling of the sexes, than as an historical fact. 
 Conscience and observation, no less than Scrip- 
 ture, teach us the weakness and defects of our 
 moral nature; these will remain precisely the 
 same, and furnish the same motive to humility 
 and watchfulness, and the same necessity for Di- 
 vine aid, whatever may have been the first occa- 
 sion on which man ; s evil passions broke out into 
 transgression of the will of God. 
 
 On the other hand, I am persuaded that there 
 are many persons of truly religious mind, to whom 
 it will be a relief from painful perplexity and 
 doubt, to find that the authority of revelation is 
 not involved in the correctness of the opinions 
 which prevailed among the Hebrew people, re- 
 specting cosmogony and primaeval history. They 
 delight to trace the guiding hand of Providence 
 in the separation of this people from amidst the 
 
XX11 PREFACE. 
 
 idolatrous nations, in order to preserve the wor- 
 ship of a Spiritual Deity, and in all the vicissi- 
 tudes of their history till its consummation. They 
 admire the wisdom and humanity of the Mosaic 
 institutions, and acknowledge this dispensation 
 as the basis of the Christian; they feel the sub- 
 limity and purity of the devotional, moral and 
 prophetic writings of Scripture; but they can 
 neither close their eyes to the discoveries of 
 science and history, nor satisfy their understand- 
 ings with the expedients which have been devised 
 for reconciling them with the language of the 
 Hebrew records. I know that this is the state 
 of many minds ; the secret, unavowed, perhaps 
 scarcely self-acknowledged convictions of many 
 others are doubtless in unison with it. And such 
 views would be more general, were it not for a 
 groundless apprehension, that there is no medium 
 between implicit, undiscriminating belief and en- 
 tire unbelief. It has been my object to show 
 that between these extremes there is a ground, 
 firm and wide enough to build an ample and 
 enduring structure of religious faith. 
 
PREFACE. XX111 
 
 To another objection which may be urged 
 against the following Essay, that it sweeps away 
 so much which has been regarded as historical, 
 and leaves nothing in its place but a dreary va- 
 cuity, I can only reply, that those with whom 
 taste is a standard of credibility, should not en- 
 gage in critical researches. It would certainly be 
 more agreeable to retain the painted scenery by 
 which the stage of history has been surrounded, 
 than by its removal to open to ourselves a view 
 into a region of doubtful light and indefinite ex- 
 tent. Yet it should not be forgotten, that the 
 fictions with which this region has been filled have 
 proved an obstacle to the extension of true his- 
 torical knowledge ; and however small the ter- 
 ritory which can be gained by such extension, it 
 will be of more real value than all that must be 
 sacrificed in order to obtain it. 
 
AN ESSAY 
 
 PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 
 
 Primaeval history is commonly understood to 
 mean, an authentic detail of the events by which 
 man, as he appears at the commencement of historic 
 times, is connected with the origin of the species 
 or with the creation of the world. To believe itself 
 in the possession of such a history, appears to have 
 been in all ages and countries almost a necessity for 
 the popular mind. The abrupt termination of the 
 chain of dependence between the present and the 
 past, the effect and the cause, is always painful. 
 Religious feeling requires that the origin of the 
 human race should be connected with some defi- 
 nite act of creative power. The pride of nations 
 
 B 
 
A IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 
 
 revolts from a short and obscure genealogy, and 
 endeavours to trace their ancestry by recorded 
 steps to the general parents of mankind, or to 
 some one partaking in a special degree of the 
 divine nature. 
 
 To construct such a history for popular use was 
 an easy task among the nations of antiquity. Its 
 materials were found in the belief of the people 
 themselves, among whom traditions of uncertain 
 origin, reaching back beyond the commencement 
 of history, came ready formed, but rude and im- 
 perfect, to the hand of the fabulist and the poet. 
 They were not embarrassed by historical criti- 
 cism, and supernatural interposition furnished the 
 means of solving every difficulty. Each nation 
 usually assumed to itself the honour of represent- 
 ing the primitive human stock, grafting others, 
 if it recognised their existence, upon this indige- 
 nous tree, and making its own country the scene 
 of the events of primaeval history. Philosophical 
 inquirers were content to regard mankind as 
 living from time immemorial in the land which 
 they occupied, or, if they were notoriously of recent 
 origin, traced them by the light of tradition or 
 conjecture to some other division of the human 
 race. One school believed the world and man to 
 
IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 3 
 
 have been strictly eternal ; another to have had a 
 definite origin in time ; x they speculated on the 
 first abode of man, 2 but they left it to mythology 
 to give a history of the steps by which he had 
 emerged from his primaeval condition, and pos- 
 sessed himself of the elements of civilization. No 
 one national belief on these subjects was assumed 
 as the standard to which all others must neces- 
 sarily conform ; few synchronisms were attempted, 
 and these only in recent times, and between 
 nations evidently connected by affinity and early 
 intercourse. 
 
 The Hebrew literature, containing in the first 
 eleven chapters of the Book of Genesis, the cos- 
 mogony and primaeval history which that people 
 received, became accessible to other nations by 
 the translation of the Pentateuch into Greek, at 
 Alexandria, in the third century before the Chris- 
 tian era. Little use, however, appears to have 
 been made even of those parts which might justly 
 have claimed the notice of the Greek and Latin 
 historians, the accounts of the origin of the people 
 and the real institutions of their law. Even had 
 the heathen writers been familiar with the Jewish 
 cosmogony and primaeval history, they would not 
 1 Diod. Sic. I, 6. 9. 2 Justin. Hist. 2. 1. 
 
 B2 
 
4 IDEA OF PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 
 
 have been received as of any higher authority than 
 the corresponding speculations of the Indians, 
 Persians or Egyptians ; the only result would 
 have been, that a place would have been given 
 them, among the Opinions of the barbarians re- 
 specting philosophy. 1 
 
 But primseval history assumed a new aspect 
 when the adoption of the Hebrew Scriptures by 
 the Christians, as inspired and consequently infal- 
 lible, seemed to offer a connected and chronolo- 
 gical record of the human race, from its very 
 origin. 
 
 At first, in the ages when Christianity had to 
 maintain a struggle with heathenism for its exist- 
 ence, the prophecies of the Old Testament, the 
 types of the law, or the prefigurations of the events 
 of the Gospel in Jewish history, chiefly occupied 
 the attention of Christian writers. When, how- 
 ever, more settled times opened upon the Church, 
 and a more comprehensive literary culture was 
 introduced, ancient history and chronology began 
 to be studied. Julius Africanus, a Christian of 
 the third century, appears to have been the first 
 who published a systematic chronology. His 
 work s which consisted of five books, is lost, with 
 1 Diog. Laert. Procemium. 
 
AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 
 
 the exception of a few fragments, 1 incorporated 
 by later writers, but we know that it went back 
 to the creation of the world, which he fixed at 
 5,500 years before Christ. Eusebins, who followed 
 Africanus, adopted the same plan, placing in one 
 column the persons and events of Jewish history, 
 and arranging those of Assyria, Egypt and Greece 
 synchronistically with them. And this method 
 has since been all but universally adopted. 
 Doubts have been raised, as we shall see, respects 
 ing the true chronology of the Jewish books, 
 especially in the times between the Creation and 
 the Flood, and between the Flood and the Call of 
 Abraham ; but hardly any, except those who have 
 altogether denied the divine origin of Judaism, 
 have questioned, that could the original text be 
 ascertained, its dates and facts must be implicitly 
 received. 
 
 The strict notion of the inspiration of the 
 entire Jewish Canon has been modified in recent 
 times, even in the schools of theology, much more 
 in the minds of men of reflection and inquiry. 
 In such an investigation as the present, it is un^ 
 necessary to attempt to fix its nature or amount. 
 
 1 They have been collected crse, vol. iii. 
 by Rowth in his Reliquiae Sa- 
 
O AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 
 
 For it is evident, that the credibility of a history 
 can never be satisfactorily established by the 
 assumption of its inspiration. This is to invert 
 the true order of proceeding. If we find a fact 
 predicted and accomplished, which the unaided 
 sagacity of the human mind could not anticipate, 
 we have recourse to inspiration as the only source 
 of knowledge ; if we find a system of truth pro- 
 mulgated, such as no human power of discovery 
 could reach, we infer a supernatural communi- 
 cation. So in regard to history; if what it 
 records could be proved to be true, and yet no 
 human means appeared by which such truth could 
 be ascertained, there would remain only the sup- 
 position of a divine communication. But such a 
 case cannot really occur, because the very pro- 
 cess of submitting the truth of history to inves- 
 tigation, implies the existence of some inde- 
 pendent evidence of the facts which it contains. 
 The supernatural origin of an historical document 
 can never, therefore, be made the basis of belief 
 in its historical authority. 
 
 Id the following inquiry into primaeval history, 
 the Jewish records are not assumed as the sole 
 and infallible source of knowledge. They are 
 regarded as an evidence of the belief of the 
 
AUTHORITY OF THE JEWISH CANON. 7 
 
 nation which admitted them among its sacred 
 books ; a nation of high antiquity, placed in con- 
 tact from its origin with those ancient kingdoms 
 in which civilization reached its earliest perfec- 
 tion, Assyria, Egypt, Phoenicia; a nation which 
 possessed the art of writing from remote times, 
 and applied it to historical purposes. Like all 
 similar works, however, they are subject to be 
 judged of according to the external evidence of 
 their authorship and date, and the internal evi- 
 dence of their truth, to be confronted with the 
 records and compared with the belief of other 
 ancient nations. There is nothing in these 
 writings to forbid our subjecting them to this test. 
 The book of Genesis incorporates written docu- 
 ments of unknown ages and authors; the book 
 of Joshua appeals to ancient poetical writings; 
 the Chronicles of Israel and Judah are cited as 
 authorities for the histories of these kingdoms re- 
 spectively ; and while the legislator and the prophet 
 claim to speak by the immediate dictate of hea- 
 ven, no author of an historical book of Scripture 
 alludes to any supernatural source of knowledge. 
 
 Taken in that large sense which popular use 
 has given to it, primaeval history goes back even 
 beyond the first appearance of man upon the earth. 
 
8 HEATHEN COSMOGONY. 
 
 Almost every nation of the ancient world had 
 its own Cosmogony, including the origin of the 
 earth and heavens, the elements, animals and 
 vegetables, man and even the gods themselves. 1 
 As they are only speculations, though assuming 
 an historic form, they represent the imperfect 
 state of natural philosophy in the age when they 
 were framed. They generally agree in represent- 
 ing a dark state of chaos and intermixture of the 
 elements, preceding the distinct existence and 
 separate properties of each as we find them in the 
 present system. 2 In some, an intellectual prin- 
 ciple presides over this change; in others it ap- 
 pears to be brought about by the mere operation 
 of natural causes, analogous to those which are 
 now in action. The idea of creation out of nothing, 
 of power exerted without an object on which it 
 could exert itself, has always been conceived by 
 the mind with difficulty, which seemed to be 
 relieved by the introduction of a chaotic matter, 
 on which the act of creation might be performed. 
 The difficulty thus removed a step further back, was 
 thought to be solved, and only the more reflecting 
 
 1 Anc.Un.Hist. 1. 23. foil. 116. Ovid. Metam. 1, 4 seq. 
 Diod. Sic. 1, 6. 2, 30. Beros. ap. Euseb. Chron. Can. 
 
 2 Euseb. Prsep. Ev. 1, 7. p. 6. ed. Scalig. 
 Diod. Sic. 1, 7. Hes. Theog. 
 
H2BREW COSMOGONY. 9 
 
 Inquired, how chaos itself had come into existence. 
 To facilitate the conception of an unknown pro- 
 cess by assimilating it to something known, crea- 
 tion was compared to the hatching of an egg, 1 to 
 the growth of a seed, or the production of animals 
 ignorantly supposed to follow the action of the 
 sun's rays upon the liquid mud. 2 Compared with 
 these rude efforts of the most civilized people, to 
 solve the problem of the world's existence, and 
 connect themselves by an unbroken chain with 
 the origin of all things, the narrative of the Crea- 
 tion in the Book of Genesis is remarkable for its 
 sublimity and truth. It speaks a plain and simple 
 language, ascribes everything to the benevolent 
 purpose of one wise and omnipotent being, and 
 relates the successive stages of creation in general 
 harmony with the discoveries of science, though 
 by no means with that exact accordance which has 
 sometimes been asserted. But though such a 
 narrative could only have been produced among 
 a people divinely instructed in the great truths 
 which distinguish revealed from natural religion, 
 it has evidently received its form from the po- 
 pular belief. To regard it in all its details, as 
 
 1 Euseb. Praep. Ev. 3, 11. Aglaophamus 1, 475. 
 p. 115. Ed.Viger. VonBohlen 2 Diod. Sic. 1, 7. 
 Altes Indien, 1, 162. Lobeck 
 
 b5 
 
10 GEOGRAPHY OF PARADISE. 
 
 the authorized history of the changes of the globe, 
 from the time when all was " without form and 
 void," to the creation of man, would require that 
 we should either close our eyes to the evidence of 
 science, or adopt interpretations of the text which 
 are not warranted by philology, nor in accordance 
 with the obvious meaning of the writer. Such 
 are the attempts which have been made to give to 
 the words " in the beginning," " create," " day," 
 a sense different from that which they commonly 
 bear. Geology has shown that our earth was not 
 brought into the state in which man was placed 
 upon it by an instantaneous act of creative power ; 
 and has established an order of succession and 
 intervals of time in the production of animal and 
 vegetable life, which were certainly not in the con- 
 templation of the author of this history. 
 
 The description of the original residence of man 
 equally manifests this influence of popular concep- 
 tion. Of the four rivers which had their head in 
 the stream which watered Eden, two, the Eu- 
 phrates and the Tigris, have their sources in the 
 mountains of Armenia. And though by no means 
 identical, 1 in the belief of the inhabitants of Meso- 
 potamia, the native country of the Israelites, they 
 1 Ritter, Geogr. 10, 101. 
 
GEOGRAPHY OP PARADISE. 11 
 
 might naturally be supposed the same, By the 
 Phison was probably intended the Phasis, and by 
 the Gihon, some imaginary stream, to which 
 various actual rivers may have contributed their 
 share, bounding the land of the eastern Cushites, 
 and reappearing in the Abyssinian arm of the 
 Nile. 1 A belief in the existence of some elevated 
 spot, situated in the North, is common in the 
 popular conceptions of ancient nations. Such was 
 Mount Meru to the Hindus, Albordj to the people 
 of Iran, Olympus to the Greeks, and with this was 
 readily combined in the oriental notion the flow of 
 rivers to the four quarters of the earth. The 
 learned volumes which have been written on the 
 site of Eden and its four rivers, might have been 
 spared, if it had been considered, that we have 
 here, not the data of science, but the vague loca- 
 lities and imaginary combinations of popular geo- 
 graphy. 
 
 In the same spirit we should receive the narra- 
 tive of all the period which precedes the migration 
 of Abraham, the true origin of the Jewish people, 
 and, therefore, the point at which, if contempora- 
 neous written records did not begin to supply the 
 materials of history, at least a body of historical 
 
 1 Josephus, Ant. Jud. i. 1, 3. 
 
12 UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 
 
 tradition may have formed itself. It describes the 
 primitive condition and early degeneracy of man, 
 and the first steps of his civilization, with a con- 
 stant reference to a superintending Providence, 
 and thus embodies truths of the highest moment, 
 and in accordance with the conclusions of philo- 
 sophy. But we see that these truths are not 
 merely clothed in a popular form, but mingled 
 with circumstances, originating in popular con- 
 ception, and which may therefore not be strictly 
 historical. Such accounts of times which precede 
 the commencement of written history, are pro- 
 duced and modified by the state of knowledge, 
 feeling and opinion among the people with whom 
 they originate, and these must be taken into the 
 account, in estimating the historical truth which 
 they comprehend. 
 
 The variety of form and colour which the human 
 race now exhibit, suggests the question, whether 
 they are to be explained by an original creation of 
 races respectively characterized by them, or by the 
 assumption of one primary form, from which the 
 rest have deviated under the influence of soil, cli- 
 mate, food, and the other circumstances by which 
 the condition of men is diversified. There is but 
 one species of man, if we take the word in its 
 
UNITY OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 13 
 
 popular sense, that of an aggregate of qualities 
 transmissible by descent, and so invariably found 
 together, that where we perceive the existence of 
 one we infer the rest without disappointment or 
 uncertainty. 1 The print of human footsteps in the 
 sand would lead every observer to infer the exist- 
 ence of beings of the same stature, physiological 
 structure and functions, intellectual faculties and 
 moral sympathies with himself. All these are in- 
 variably found together, the same in number and 
 mutual relation, differing only in degree. In 
 every part of the world, notwithstanding their dif- 
 ferences, the tribes of men intermingle freely, and 
 their offspring continue to multiply, unlike the 
 product of the union of dissimilar species. It has 
 been further argued that, according to the ana- 
 logy of nature, individuals of the same species, 
 however numerous or widely diffused, appear to 
 originate from one stock, not from many; and 
 hence that the human race has probably had 
 
 1 The definitions given of into the Physical History of 
 species by physiologists and Man, i. 106, says, " Species 
 naturalists generally involve includes only the following 
 some historical fact. Cuvier, conditions — separate origin 
 Th. of the Earth, p. 116, de- and distinctness of race, 
 fines it as "all the indivi- evinced by the constant trans- 
 duals which descend from mission of some characteris- 
 each other, ox from a common tic peculiarity of organiza- 
 parentage." Prichard, Res. tion." 
 
14 ORIGIN FROM A SINGLE PAIR. 
 
 its origin from a single pair, 1 all the actual varie- 
 ties having been subsequently introduced. Little, 
 however, can be concluded from this analogy, 
 because we have no historical proof of such a dif- 
 fusion of species from a single centre. All that 
 can be proved is, that the regions of the earth 
 have their characteristic groupes of productions, 
 vegetable and animal, but as we do not see the 
 species originate, we cannot pronounce on the 
 number of individuals of which the first stock 
 consisted, on merely analogical grounds. 
 
 We find, it is true, traditions, as they are 
 called, that is, a popular belief and apparently 
 historical account, of the origin of the human 
 race from a single pair, in remote and uncon- 
 nected spots. But it is so obvious an answer to 
 the question how they originated, to reverse the 
 process by which they multiply, and trace them 
 back to the simplest combination out of which 
 increase can arise, that we cannot receive this 
 coincidence, as a proof of a real reminiscence of 
 a fact. On the contrary, these legends are so 
 purely local, so intimately connected with the 
 manners, productions and language of the region 
 in which they are found, as to lead to the con- 
 1 Prichard. i. 97. 
 
VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 15 
 
 elusion that they have been independently formed, 
 and that their resemblance in the one point of 
 supposing a single pair the origin of the whole race 
 is to be explained by the cause above mentioned. 
 
 Whatever difficulty the naturalist may have in 
 determining, whether the difference between the 
 European and the Negro, the Calmuck and the 
 Red Indian, are what he calls specific differences, 
 or amount only to varieties, the differences them- 
 selves are palpable, and urge us to inquire into their 
 cause. Two modes may be conceived, in which 
 they may have originated from a stock primarily 
 the same. Varieties spring up from time to time 
 in the present races, we know not by what law, 
 exhibiting individuals differing widely from the 
 general type of the race, and as their peculiarities 
 are genetic, that is, exist from the birth, and are 
 not superinduced by accident, they are capable of 
 being transmitted to a new progeny. If we sup- 
 pose a variety so constituted, to be confined to 
 itself, a race might in time originate, in which 
 these peculiarities should be perpetuated. We 
 see among the lower animals, that varieties thus 
 arise, which do not vanish again, but remain in 
 the line in which they first appeared. But in the 
 human race the limits of these accidental varieties 
 
16 VARIETIES OF THE HUMAN SPECIES. 
 
 are narrower than in the brutes, they bear the cha- 
 racter of disease and deformity, and we never see 
 them prolonged for more than a few generations. 
 There is no known instance of accidental varieties 
 giving rise to communities, all characterized by 
 them, or of their being combined, like the existing 
 varieties in colour and form among men, with dif- 
 ferences in speech, manners and religion. Where 
 no intermixture of races has taken place, these 
 differences were not less marked, nor differently 
 localized three thousand years ago. The Negro, 
 with all his peculiarities of form, colour and hair, 
 appears just the same in the paintings of the age 
 of Thothmes III., fifteen centuries before the 
 Christian sera, as he is now seen in the interior of 
 Africa. Origination from accidental varieties, such 
 as we see in the lower animals, would also exclude 
 all idea of adaptation to climate, which, neverthe- 
 less, in the case of the Negro, is undeniable, and 
 probably pervades the other races also. 
 
 It is difficult to assign limits to the influence of 
 climate, joined to that of soil, food and modes of 
 life, in producing changes in the human form. 
 It is probable that its range was greater when 
 civilization was less diffused, which enables man 
 to protect himself against the injurious effects of 
 
INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 17 
 
 the elements, and gives variety to his occupations, 
 his clothing and diet. No direct experiment can 
 be instituted to ascertain it, and the observation 
 of nature's own processes is attended with great 
 difficulty. It is but lately that scientific atten- 
 tion has been directed to ethnography, or the 
 description of the physical, intellectual and moral 
 peculiarities of the different races of men : we 
 have no means of comparing the same race under 
 altered circumstances, or, if we perceive a change, 
 of assigning its own share to each of the complex 
 causes which may have produced it. In general, 
 however, the survey of those races whose successive 
 conditions we can ascertain, presents to us rather 
 the proofs of the tenacity with which nature adheres 
 to her established forms, than the flexibility with 
 which she varies them. Still these forms are not 
 absolutely unchangeable; we see nations whose 
 language proclaims them to have descended from 
 a common stock, 1 exhibiting a different complexion 
 and features, according to the country which they 
 occupy, and we cannot presume to say how far 
 this assimilating power extends. No known effect 
 
 1 It must not be supposed Scandinavia to Hindostan, 
 
 that I mean by this expres- may, itself, have been spoken 
 
 sion a single family. That by men of different physical 
 
 common speech, the elements peculiarities, and this weakens 
 
 of which are found from the argument. 
 
18 INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 
 
 of climate is adequate to account for the existing 
 varieties of complexion. We see no tendency in 
 the Negro race settled in North America to ap- 
 proach the colour of the Whites, though other 
 peculiarities of the Negro are said to wear out in 
 those who are the most perfectly domesticated. 1 
 On the other hand, no tendency displays itself, in 
 the white races established in intertropical cli- 
 mates whose population is black, to approach the 
 colour of the natives, if there be no intermarriage 
 between them, much less to assume their osteolo- 
 gical and physiological characters. The trifling 
 infuscation which exposure to the sun produces 
 is confined to individuals, and the children are 
 born and grow up as fair as in temperate cli- 
 mates. Yet, though we cannot discern in the 
 effects of heat any adequate cause for the diver- 
 sities by which different climates are distinguished, 
 there is a general conformity between colour and 
 climate, an adaptation in the peculiarity of this 
 part of the system, to the circumstances under 
 which life and health are to be maintained. We 
 by no means invariably find the peculiarities of 
 the Negro in complete combination; the deep 
 
 1 Dr. Stanhope Smith, Com- Human Species, p. 55. 
 plexion and Figure in the 
 
INFLUENCE OF CLIMATE. 19 
 
 black complexion and the woolly hair are seen, 
 without the osteological characters in some tribes 
 of the Indian Archipelago. The nations of the 
 deepest black colour, however, are in general found 
 in the equatorial and intertropical regions of the 
 old world, while tawney and fair-complexioned 
 races appear successively, as we ascend to higher 
 latitudes. 1 The apparent exceptions to this rule 
 may be explained from the different elevations of 
 tracts which lie beneath the same parallels. We 
 must, therefore, either suppose that each of these 
 races has had a separate stock, and as their shades 
 are endless, the number of these stocks will be 
 infinite ; or that climate has in some way pro- 
 duced the diversities, which appear to follow a 
 climatical law. In our ignorance of its influence 
 we cannot pronounce this latter supposition im- 
 possible ; 2 but we may safely say, that if all the 
 varieties which we see have been superinduced on 
 a common stock, a very long period must be 
 allowed to accomplish this — a period in which 
 
 1 Pricliard, Researches, bk. other race, and yet seems es- 
 iii. ch. 15. sential to the Negro. M. 
 
 2 The pigmental membrane Flourens, however, has made 
 of the Negro has been re- experiments which show that 
 garded as a proof, that this its rudiments are found in the 
 race must have been from the other races. Edin. Journ. of 
 first distinct, as it exists in no Phys. Sc. 1843. 
 
20 DIVISION INTO RACES. 
 
 Time may have integrated the infinitesimal effects 
 which alone can be marked within the limits of 
 history. It is only, therefore, by a very great 
 enlargement of the common chronology, that we 
 can avoid the conclusion of an original diversity of 
 race. 
 
 Since these varieties blend with each other by 
 imperceptible gradation, it would be useless to 
 endeavour to fix their number on any scientific 
 principle. The common division of the inhabi- 
 tants of the ancient world into the Caucasian, the 
 Calmuck, and the Ethiopic varieties, has the ad- 
 vantage of being founded on obvious differences, 
 and is well adapted to history. The name Cau- 
 casian has been derived partly from the circum- 
 stance that near this mountain, in Circassia, Min- 
 grelia and Georgia, the most perfect specimens of 
 this race, and of the human form generally, are 
 found ; partly from a theoretical opinion, that the 
 tribes which display the same peculiarities have 
 been diffused from this region, as from a centre. 
 Its characters are, an oval form of the skull, when 
 viewed in front, an expanded forehead, a facial 
 angle approaching the perpendicular, and a similar 
 relation of the upper and lower jaw. The com- 
 plexion varies from fair to a deep shade of black. 
 
DIVISION INTO RACES. 21 
 
 To these are joined such a stature and proportion 
 of the frame as are fitted to give the highest com- 
 bination of strength and agility. To this class 
 belong all the nations most remarkable in ancient 
 history, the Indians and Persians, the Assyrians 
 and the other Semitic nations, the Libyans and 
 Moors, the Greeks and Romans, and the inhabi- 
 tants of Modern Europe, as far as they descend 
 from the Celtic, Gothic, or Sarmatian stem. The 
 Ethiopic skull is narrow and elongated, as if by la- 
 teral compression, the facial angle is less, the jaws 
 and teeth project, the nose is flattened and turned 
 up, the lips are thick, and the hair short and 
 crisp. 1 The inhabitants of Africa in the equatorial 
 regions exhibit the type of this race in its widest 
 deviation; the blackest colour, the most woolly 
 hair, the lowest facial angle, the smallest average 
 quantity of brain and medulla oblongata, and a 
 frame of inferior agility and strength. Where 
 this variety reaches its extreme point of deviation, 
 as in the Negro of the countries south of the 
 Great Desert, it seems to be accompanied with a 
 degeneracy of the intellectual powers, which has 
 condemned this race to be, in all historic times, 
 
 1 Prichard, Res. i. 289, seq. 
 
22 DIVISION INTO RACES. 
 
 the slaves of Europeans and Asiatics. The ancient 
 Egyptians and the other tribes which occupied the 
 valley of the Nile, approached by their hair and 
 colour to the Ethiopic type, by the form of the skull 
 to the Caucasian, and this alone might prove the 
 impossibility of fixing any precise lines of distinc- 
 tion. The Mongolian or Calmuck 1 variety is 
 characterized by the breadth of face, produced by 
 the great lateral extension of the bony arch which 
 unites the cheek bone to the skull, giving to the 
 whole countenance something of a lozenge shape ; 
 and by the flatness of the upper part of the face. 
 In the Chinese and the Calmucks, the eyes are ge- 
 nerally placed obliquely, with the internal angles 
 descending towards the nose. The Finns in Eu- 
 rope, the Nomadic nations of Northern and Central 
 Asia, the Japanese and Chinese, belong to this 
 type. In the ancient world they were represented 
 by the Scythians and other tribes, who hovered on 
 the borders of the civilized countries, and occasion- 
 ally made irruptions into them. China and Ja- 
 pan exhibit a social state, not inferior to that of an- 
 cient Egypt and India, and may be regarded as the 
 most perfect specimen of this race. In the Esqui- 
 
 1 Prichard, Res. i. 305. 
 
THE DELUGE. 23 
 
 meaux and Finns, its outward peculiarities are the 
 most repulsive, and accompany the lowest state of 
 intellect and manners. But Mongolian civilization 
 hardly, came within the view of the writers by 
 whom ancient history has been transmitted to us, 
 or only at its close. To one of their tribes, the 
 Huns, was owing the most remarkable revolution 
 which the world has undergone, the overthrow of 
 the Roman empire, and the settlement of the 
 Germans in Western Europe. 
 
 Primaeval History is usually divided into the 
 Ante-diluvian and Post-diluvian period. If the 
 whole of the human race, except eight persons, 
 had really been destroyed, and all traces of the 
 past works of man obliterated by a flood, which 
 covered the whole earth, such an event must have 
 made not only a division but a chasm in history. 1 
 Knowledge and art, being reduced to the indivi- 
 dual attainments of the survivors of this cata- 
 strophe, must have begun their course of improve- 
 ment almost from the elements. Society must 
 
 1 I do not examine the at- not admit any other. Heevi- 
 
 tempts which have been made dently believed, that the whole 
 
 to show, that the writer of the earth was covered by the 
 
 book of Genesis meant to deluge, and that the whole 
 
 speak only of a partial flood, human race, as it existed in 
 
 because they rest on no phi- his day, was derived from the 
 
 lological ground, and we can- sons of Noah. 
 
24 THE DELUGE. 
 
 have retraced all its stages, from that of a single 
 family to civilized empires. The surface of the 
 earth must have been brought into such a state 
 by the weight and agitation of a flood which rose 
 to the level of the highest mountains, that in the 
 attempt to resume its cultivation, men must have 
 experienced the most formidable difficulties, and 
 must have spread and multiplied much less ra- 
 pidly than in the ordinary state of the world. 
 Attempts have indeed been made, to show that 
 the destruction of the human race would be soon 
 supplied by its power of increase, and that even 
 the shortest interval between the Flood and the 
 appearance of populous kingdoms in history, which 
 the common chronology allows, would suffice to 
 call many millions into existence. But in coun- 
 tries reduced to such a state as that in which Asia 
 must have been after the flood, it is impossible 
 that men should multiply in that geometrical 
 ratio, by which their numbers rise so rapidly 
 under the pen of the calculator. x Every thing 
 which contributes to the protection and support 
 of man, must have been recreated ; and as nature 
 does less for the supply of his wants, than those of 
 
 1 The calculations of Peta- may be seen in the Anc. Un. 
 vius, Cumberland and Winston Hist. 1, 361. 
 
EVIDENCE OF GEOLOGY. 25 
 
 the brutes, they would increase more rapidly than 
 he did, and add to the difficulties which impeded 
 his diffusion. 
 
 The evidence of geology has been appealed to 
 in proof of the occurrence of the Deluge. x When 
 first the existence of aquatic animals in the solid 
 strata was noticed, such a submersion of the earth 
 was supposed to have brought them there. By 
 more careful study and reasoning it Was perceived, 
 that instead of indicating a sudden action of water, 
 limited to the surface, and strictly confined to the 
 period of a year, 2 these phenomena were the 
 result of causes tranquilly operating through a 
 long series of ages, in the depths of the ocean, or 
 in lakes of fresh water, and this hypothesis was 
 necessarily abandoned. 
 
 It was subsequently made evident, that since 
 the deposition and elevation of the most recent 
 strata, the earth's surface has been violently torn 
 by currents of water, which have transported 
 
 1 The existence of a Deluge tion of the forces of the sun 
 is certainly not disproved by and moon could raise a tide 
 showing that there exists no which should cover the tops 
 natural cause adequate to its of the mountains. See Hum- 
 production. Yet it is impor- boldt's Cosmos, p. 325. 
 tant to remark, that Bessel 2 Gen. viii. 11, 13. 
 has proved, that no combina- 
 
26 EVIDENCE OF GEOLOGY. 
 
 blocks of stone, accumulated hills of gravel, and 
 imbedded in them the remains of land animals 
 now no longer existing, or natives of countries 
 very remote from those in which these remains 
 are now found. This class of phenomena became 
 in its turn the evidence of the Deluge. 1 Further 
 investigation, however, showed, that they were 
 the results of prolonged, repeated, and multiform 
 currents of water, the later of which had modi- 
 fied the results of the earlier : the gravel of which 
 the beds were composed was found to have been 
 drifted from various centres and in opposite direc- 
 tions ; the animals whose remains were preserved 
 in them, to belong to different seras of extinct 
 zoology. 2 Nor could the annihilation of their races 
 be consistently referred to an event expressly de- 
 scribed as intended for their preservation. 3 It 
 must therefore be acknowledged, that geology 
 affords no specific confirmation to the Jewish 
 account of the Deluge, although it gives abundant 
 
 1 Bucldand's Reliquiee Di- 1823. The opinion expressed 
 luvianse, Observations on the in this work is retracted in 
 organic remains contained in the same author's Bridge- 
 caves, fissures and diluvial water Treatise, i. p. 94. 
 gravel and other geological 2 Ansted's Geology, 2, 121. 
 phenomena, attesting the ac- 3 Gen. vi. 19. 
 tion of an Universal Deluge. 
 
CHALDiEAN AND INDIAN DELUGE. 27 
 
 testimony to the submersion of almost every part 
 of the globe, under circumstances different from 
 those which this narrative describes. 
 
 Should future research show, that in the latest 
 results of what has been called the Diluvial period, 
 the remains of man exist, along with those of 
 mammalia, belonging partly to extinct and partly 
 to existing species, we shall still be far removed 
 from the proof of a simultaneous and universal 
 Deluge. The retention of the name Diluvial, which 
 was originally understood to mean, produced by 
 the Noachic Deluge, leads to much popular mis- 
 apprehension. Among geologists themselves, it is 
 now recognized only as a convenient name for those 
 results of moving water, which exceed the power 
 of the present rivers, even in their highest state of 
 flood. 
 
 The early histories of many nations include 
 traditionary accounts of a Deluge which has de- 
 stroyed either the whole human race, or the popu- 
 lation of the country in which it happened. They 
 have been received, like the geological facts before 
 mentioned, too indiscriminately, as evidence in 
 favour of the common opinion ; and, therefore, it 
 will be necessary to examine them separately. 
 The. most striking coincidence with the Hebrew 
 c2 
 
28 CHALDEAN AND INDIAN DELUGE. 
 
 account is found in the Babylonian traditions, as 
 preserved by Berosus and quoted by Josephus 
 and Eusebius. 1 The number of ten kings, said to 
 have reigned in Chaldsea before the Flood, corre- 
 sponds with the number of ten generations, inter- 
 vening between Adam and Noah, 2 though neither 
 in the names, nor actions, nor length of life attri- 
 buted to them, can any resemblance be traced to 
 the antediluvian patriarchs. The tenth in succes- 
 sion was Xisuthrus, who was warned by Saturn 
 that the world would be destroyed by a flood, and 
 built an ark in which he saved himself, his family, 
 and animals of all kinds. On the flood's subsiding, 
 he let loose some birds from the ark, who, on their 
 second flight, returned, having their feet daubed 
 with mud ; and at length came back no more ; 
 whence Xisuthrus, concluding that the surface of 
 the earth had re-appeared from beneath the waters, 
 descended from his ark upon the mountains of 
 Armenia, raised an altar, and worshipped the gods. 
 The Zend-Avesta, the sacred book of the followers 
 of Zoroaster, contains the mention of a deluge, 
 but the circumstances of it bear no resemblance 
 
 1 Euseb. Prsep. Evang. lib. 2 Euseb. Chron. Gr. p. 5. 
 ix. p. 414. Chron. Armen. i. ed. Scalig. 
 p. 31. Jos. Ant. 1, 3, 6. 
 
INDIAN AND MEXICAN DELUGE. 29 
 
 to the Mosaic narrative. The earth is covered 
 with a flood of waters, from which Mount Albordj 
 first emerges, but instead of being sent for the 
 destruction of the human race, it is the source of 
 the rivers, and of all the other benefits which the 
 element of water produces to mankind. 1 Accord- 
 ing to the Hindu tradition of the incarnation of 
 Vischnu, the Preserver, in the form of a fish, 
 Menu was commanded by him to build a ship, in 
 which to save himself and seven holy persons, 
 with seeds of all sorts and beasts of the field, 
 from the deluge which was about to destroy a 
 wicked race. The flood rises, the ship rests on 
 the top of Himavan, and Menu becomes the father 
 of a new race. 2 Remarkable coincidences with the 
 Jewish account of the Deluge have also been pointed 
 out, in the traditions of the Mexican and other 
 American nations; and as they are found com- 
 bined with a close resemblance in their astrono- 
 mical systems to the science of the oldest people 
 in Asia, it seems more natural to suppose that this 
 traditional belief in a deluge was brought by the 
 progenitors of the Mexicans from their ancient 
 
 1 Bundehesch, § 7. Kleu- hended by Mr. Faber, Pagan 
 ker's Zendavesta, 3, 68. It Idolatry, 2, 60. 
 has been strangely misappre- 2 Bohlen altes Indien,! , 218= 
 
30 GREEK TRADITIONS. 
 
 Asiatic abodes, than that it originated in the New 
 World. 1 The Phrygian legend of Annacus or 
 Nannacus, does not go beyond the fact of a 
 deluge. 2 Among the Phoenicians we find no men- 
 tion of such a tradition, though from the resem- 
 blance of their cosmogony with the Jewish, we 
 might have expected it. The priests of Sais, when 
 Solon mentioned the flood of Deucalion, ridiculed 
 the novelty and imperfection of the Greek tradi- 
 tion, alleging that there had been, and would be, 
 many partial destructions of the human race, both 
 by fire and water; and Plato himself who re- 
 cords this conversation, speaks in his own person 
 in the same strain. 3 These are evidently not tra- 
 ditions of an historical event, such as the Mosaic 
 deluge, but fanciful speculations. 4 Nor has any- 
 thing come to light in the monuments of Egypt, 
 
 1 Clavigero, Hist. Mex. Eng. identified with the universal 
 Transl. i, 244. PL 19. p. 410. deluge recorded in the Old 
 464. Testament. After a careful 
 
 2 Suidas sub voce Nawa- perusal of their own written 
 kos. accounts, we feel persuaded 
 
 3 Tim. iii. 21 seq. Critias, that this deluge of the Chi- 
 iii. 111. nese is described, rather as 
 
 4 " To the period -of Yaou, interrupting the business of 
 something more than 2000 agriculture, than as involving 
 years before our sera, the Chi- a general destruction of the 
 nese carry back their tradition human race." — Davis, The 
 of an extensive flood, which Chinese, vol. i. p. 140. 
 
 by some persons has been 
 
FLOOD OF DEUCALION. 31 
 
 indicating an affinity in this point with the Asiatic 
 tradition. 1 
 
 The name of Deucalion appears early in the 
 remains of Greek literature,, but at first only as 
 the mythical patriarch of the Hellenic race. 2 The 
 subjects of the Homeric poems would not natu- 
 rally lead to the mention of the flood ; but it could 
 hardly have been omitted by Hesiod, in his deduc- 
 tion of the history of mankind through its ages of 
 gold, silver, brass and iron, 3 had it been known to 
 him, at least as anything more than a local flood 
 in Thessaly. The account of Deucalion, given by 
 Apollodorus (1. 7. 2.), bears evident marks of being 
 compounded of two fables originally distinct, in 
 one of which, and probably the older, the descent 
 of the Hellenes was traced through Deucalion 
 to Prometheus and Pandora, without the mention 
 
 1 Manetho, as quoted by tuum vetustorum, adventare 
 
 Syncellus, p. 40, appears to diluvium prasscii, metuentes- 
 
 speak of the sacred books of que ne caerimoniarum oblite- 
 
 Thotb, as translated after the raretur memoria, penitus ope- 
 
 Deluge into Greek, by the rosis digestos fodinis per loca 
 
 second Hermes ; but this ab- diversa struxerunt." But this 
 
 surdity cannot have proceeded account is too late, and too 
 
 from Manetho himself, whose full of obvious errors, to me- 
 
 name has been borrowed by rit any credit, 
 
 some later writer. Ammianus 3 Hesiod, quoted by Strabo, 
 
 Marcellinus, 22, 15, speaking 7. p. 446. ed. Oxf. 
 
 of the Egyptian grottoes, says: 3 Hes. Works and Days, 
 
 " Syringes ut fertur, periti ri- 107 — 172. 
 
32 FLOOD OF DEUCALION. 
 
 of a deluge. In the other, the destruction of the 
 brazen race by a flood, and the re-peopling of the 
 earth by the casting of stones, is related in the 
 common way. That these two narratives cannot 
 originally have belonged to the same mythus, is 
 evident from their incongruity; for as mankind were 
 created by Prometheus, the father of Deucalion, 
 there was no time for them to have passed through 
 those stages of degeneracy, by which they reached 
 the depravity of the brazen age. It is doubtful, 
 therefore, whether the tradition of Deucalion's 
 flood is older than the time when the intercourse 
 with Asia began to be frequent. Hellanicus, 1 
 about the beginning of the fifth century before 
 Christ, appears to have mentioned the ark in 
 which he saved himself, as resting on Mount 
 Othrys in Thessaly. Pindar, in his ninth Olym- 
 pian, describes Deucalion and Pyrrha as descend- 
 ing from Parnassus, and re-peopling the earth by a 
 race sprung from stones. 2 As we reach the time 
 when the Greeks enjoyed more extensive and lei- 
 
 1 Schol. Pind. 9, 60. ed. by diseases, and in many other 
 
 Boeckh. ways. On one of these de- 
 
 3 The iraXcuol x6yoi of which luges, in which all but a few 
 
 Plato speaks, Leg. 3. 2, 677, perished, he builds, as many 
 
 related that many destruc- have done since, a theory of 
 
 tions of mankind had taken the progress of society, 
 place, some by deluges, some 
 
FLOOD OF OGYGES. 33 
 
 surely communication with Asia, through the con- 
 quests of Alexander, we find new circumstances 
 introduced into the story, which assimilate it more 
 closely to the Asiatic tradition. Plutarch mentions 
 the dove, and its employment to ascertain that 
 the waters of the inundation had retired. 1 Lucian, 
 an Asiatic Greek, in describing the legends of the 
 temple of Hierapolis, adds the circumstance, that 
 the sons of Deucalion, with their wives, and pairs 
 of all living animals, were preserved in the ark ; 2 
 and thus, when we reach the country in which the 
 tradition first appears, we find the closest con- 
 formity to the narrative in Genesis. The flood of 
 Ogyges has no claim to be considered as a tradi- 
 tion of a general deluge ; his name, as a king of 
 Attica, does not occur in any extant author before 
 the age of Alexander, and the story of his flood ap- 
 pears to belong to Bceotia, a country very subject 
 to inundations from the stoppage of the outlets, by 
 which the Lake Copais discharges itself into the sea. 3 
 It must thus appear very doubtful whether the 
 earliest mythology of the Greeks contained any 
 
 1 Plut. viii. 930. ed. Wyt- thor of this treatise ; but the 
 
 tenb. (968 F.) question is of no importance 
 
 5 Luc. de Dea Syria, § 12. in reference to our inquiry. 
 9, 93. ed. Bip. It has been 3 Phil. Museum, 2, 348. 
 doubted if Lucian be the au- 
 
 c 5 
 
34 MESOPOTAMIAN ORIGIN OF JEWISH BELIEF. 
 
 reference to a destruction of the human race by a 
 flood. But the coincidence of the Babylonian, 
 the Indian, the Mexican, and the Jewish accounts, 
 can hardly be explained, without supposing a very 
 high antiquity of the Asiatic tradition, an antiquity 
 preceding our knowledge of any definite facts, in 
 the history of these nations. That the scriptural 
 narrative should have originated among the Jews 
 in Palestine, and have been borrowed by other na- 
 tions from them, is highly improbable : all the cir- 
 cumstances bear the traces of a Mesopotamian 
 origin. The ark is represented as being built of cy- 
 press, the only wood fit for shipbuilding which this 
 region afforded, 1 and covered with bitumen, which 
 its asphaltic springs furnished in abundance. 2 
 The dove was a sacred animal in S3^ria, probably 
 wherever the goddess Mylitta was worshipped. 3 
 Ararat, on w r hich the ark rests, is in the vicinity 
 of the sources of the two great Mesopotamian 
 rivers, and its summit the loftiest in Asia, west- 
 ward of Caucasus. The plain of Shinar is the 
 place in which the history of mankind re-com- 
 mences, when the Deluge is over. 4 
 
 1 Arrian. 9, 19. note of Broukhusius- 
 
 2 Herod. 1, 179. 4 Gen. xi. 2. 
 8 Tibull. 1, 7, 18, with the 
 
SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 35 
 
 However high we may be warranted to carry up 
 the existence of this tradition in Asia, 1 it will not 
 necessarily follow that it was founded upon a real 
 fact. A tradition is a popular belief, and must, 
 like everything else, have a cause ; and for its 
 special characters, a special cause. But that it is 
 not, in itself, evidence of the truth of the fact 
 which it assumes, may be seen in almost every 
 case, in which the popular belief can be confronted 
 with scientific, monumental and documentary evi- 
 dence. There is hardly a remarkable remnant of 
 antiquity to which it has not attached some false 
 explanation. It matters not whether the tradi- 
 tion have been written down and incorporated 
 with history ; it gains no higher authority by this 
 change ; the cause of its uncertainty is in its 
 origin. The imaginations of the vulgar respect- 
 ing historical events do not now find their way 
 into national belief, because the cultivation of cri- 
 ticism keeps imagination under control, or limits 
 it to the uneducated ; but it was otherwise when 
 no written or monumental history existed, and 
 
 1 The only mode of avoid- after the Captivity. This is 
 
 ing tins inference respecting the opinion of Von Bohlen and 
 
 the high antiquity of the tra- others, but it appears to me 
 
 dition, is to suppose that the in the highest degree impro- 
 
 Book of Genesis was written bable. 
 
36 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 
 
 the faith of all classes was the same. There is 
 abundant evidence that the past changes of the 
 globe and the fate of the human race, as in- 
 fluenced by them, have excited the imagination to 
 speculate on their cause and circumstances, and 
 that these speculations, assuming an historical 
 form, have been received as matter of fact. The 
 Mexicans believed in four great cycles, the first 
 terminated by famine, the second by fire, from 
 which only birds and two human beings escaped ; 
 the third by storms of wind, which only the mon- 
 keys escaped ; the fourth by water, in which all 
 human beings save two were changed into fishes ; 
 and to these cycles they ascribed an united dura- 
 tion of eighteen thousand years. 1 It was a \6yog, 
 a popular legend, among the Greeks, that Thes- 
 saly had once been a lake, and that Neptune had 
 opened a passage for the waters through the vale 
 of Tempe. 2 The occupation of the banks of the 
 rivers of this district by the Pelasgic tribes, which 
 must have been subsequent to the opening of the 
 gorge, is the earliest fact in Greek history, and the 
 Xoyog itself no doubt originated in a very simple 
 speculation. The sight of a narrow gorge, the 
 
 1 Humboldt, Vue des Cor- 2 Herod. 7, 129. 
 dilleras, 208. 
 
SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 37 
 
 sole outlet to the waters of a whole district, natu- 
 rally suggests the idea of its having once been 
 closed, and as the necessary consequence, the 
 inundation of the whole region which it now serves 
 to drain. The inhabitants of Samothrace 1 had a 
 similar traditionary belief, that the narrow strait 
 by which the Euxine communicates with the Me- 
 diterranean was once closed, and that its sudden 
 disruption produced a deluge, which swept the sea- 
 coast of Asia and buried some of their own towns. 
 The fact of traces of the action of water at a 
 higher level in ancient times on these shores is 
 unquestionable ; under the name of raised beaches, 
 such phenomena are familiar to geologists on many 
 coasts : but that the tradition was produced by 
 speculation on its cause, not by an obscure recol- 
 lection of its occurrence, is also clear ; for it has 
 been shown by physical proofs, that a discharge 
 of the waters of the Euxine would not cause such 
 a deluge as the tradition supposed. 2 It is not ne- 
 cessary that philosophy should have been culti- 
 vated among a people, to excite them to speculate 
 upon the causes of remarkable natural appear- 
 ances. The inhabitants of Polynesia have a tra- 
 
 1 Diod. Sic. 5, 47. volutions du Globe, ed. 1826, 
 
 3 Cuvier, Disc, sur les Re- p. 87. 
 
38 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 
 
 dition that the islands with which their ocean is 
 studded are but the fragments of a continent 
 which once existed. In Greece, where a similar 
 state of things gave rise to a similar hypothesis, the 
 continent of Lyctonia was supposed to have been 
 split into the islands of the Mediterranean. 1 The 
 inhabitants of the western parts of Cornwall have 
 a tradition, as it is called, that the Scilly islands 
 were once united to the mainland, by a tract now 
 submerged. 2 In none of these instances does 
 any historical fact appear to lie at the foundation 
 of the tradition, even where, as in the case last 
 mentioned, it is not in itself improbable. If the 
 tradition of a Deluge is more widely spread than 
 any of these, so are also the phenomena on which 
 it is founded. No part of the world has yet been 
 examined which does not bear marks of having 
 been covered by water ; and though some of these 
 facts have only been discovered by modern philo- 
 sophical research, others must have been obvious 
 from the first moment when man set his foot upon 
 the reclaimed surface. The sand and shells which 
 induced Herodotus 3 to believe that all Lower 
 
 1 Orph. Argon. 1283. lar tradition respecting Jer- 
 
 3 Lyell, Principles of Geo- sey, i. 77. 
 
 logy, i. p. 282. See in In- 3 Her. 2, 12. 
 glis, Channel Islands, a simi- 
 
SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OP TRADITION. 39 
 
 Egypt, and even the hills above Memphis, had 
 once been covered by the sea, had lain there for 
 ages, before they drew his attention, and surely 
 his was not the first reflecting mind that had spe- 
 culated on their origin. 1 If few were capable of 
 combining these and similar facts into a tradi- 
 tion which should appear to explain them, many 
 would be ready to receive it when framed, because 
 the imagination and curiosity, even of the vulgar, 
 is excited by such marks of unusual agencies in 
 nature. We know not, indeed, how far the belief 
 of the literary and sacerdotal class, from whom 
 our accounts of the Deluge in various countries 
 are derived, may have corresponded with the po- 
 pular belief; they are usually found in sacred 
 books, the knowledge of which, if not forbidden 
 to the people, cannot have been much diffused 
 among them. To allege that the time which in- 
 tervened between the Deluge and the distinct 
 existence of the nations among whom we find the 
 traditional belief in it, was too short for the growth 
 of a speculative explanation, assumes that we have 
 a real chronology of this period. A similar as- 
 sumption is involved in the objection that man- 
 
 1 If Ovid may be trusted similar appearances, a theory 
 (Met. 15, 259), Pythagoras not unlike that of modern 
 had deduced from these and geology. 
 
40 SPECULATION THE ORIGIN OF TRADITION. 
 
 kind were too rude and ignorant to occupy them- 
 selves in such speculations. It is because we take 
 for granted that a little more than two thousand 
 years before Christ, mankind were reduced to a 
 family of eight persons, that we attribute to times 
 preceding history this incapacity for reflection. 
 That traditions of the destruction of the human race 
 by fire should be comparatively rare, is natural : 
 the marks of the agency of this element, except in 
 the case of active volcanoes, are much less obvious 
 than those of water, and eluded the observation of 
 naturalists, till a very recent period. 
 
 The decisive proof, however, that the traditions 
 of the Deluge are rather a very ancient hypothesis, 
 than the reminiscence of a primaeval fact, is that 
 they accord not with the phenomena, but with 
 such a partial knowledge, and such conceptions 
 of their cause, as prevailed in ancient times. 
 They explain what is obvious, that water has once 
 covered the summits of the present dry land, but 
 not the equally certain, though less obvious fact, 
 that long intervals of time and a great variety of 
 circumstances must have existed. This want of 
 conformity concludes much more strongly against 
 an historical tradition, than a general and vague 
 conformity in favour of it. 
 
DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 41 
 
 If from these marks of the action of water on the 
 earth, the notion of a Deluge arose, it would not 
 only include, as a necessary consequence, the de- 
 struction of all living things, but also the guilt of 
 the race which thus violently perished. No prin- 
 ciple appears more universally to pervade the 
 legends of early times, than that great calamities 
 implied great guilt. At Mavalipuram, on the 
 coast of Coromandel, the remains of several an- 
 cient temples and other buildings, now close to the 
 sea, suggested the idea that a splendid city had been 
 buried under the waters. Such a calamity must 
 have been inflicted by the gods as a punishment for 
 some enormous crime, and this was found in the im- 
 piety of the tyrannical king, the great Bali, who had 
 been outwitted by Vischnu and condemned to hell. 
 According to another account the gods destroyed it, 
 because its magnificence rivalled that of the celestial 
 courts. 1 It was on account of the wickedness of the 
 Atlantians, that Jupiter submerged their island and 
 drowned the whole race. 2 A similar tale is related 
 of an island near China, the impious inhabitants of 
 which thus perished, while their righteous king 
 
 1 Asiat. Res. 2. p. 18. Sou- 2 Plato, Tim. iii. 25. Comp. 
 they's Kehama, xv. with Critias, ad fin. iii. 109. 
 
42 DESTRUCTION OF THE HUMAN RACE. 
 
 escaped. 1 The remains of buildings, or rocks 
 which fancy has converted into such, seen through 
 the transparent waters near the margin of lakes, 
 have very generally given rise to legends of the 
 destruction of towns for the wickedness of their 
 inhabitants. 2 Dr. Robinson, in his Travels in Pales- 
 tine, (2. 589,) mentions a tradition that a city had 
 once stood in the desert between Petra and He- 
 bron, the people of which had perished for their 
 vices, and been converted into stone. Seetzen, who 
 went to the spot, found no traces of ruins, but a 
 number of stony concretions resembling in form 
 and size the human head. They had been igno- 
 rantly supposed to be petrified heads, and a legend 
 framed to account for their owners suffering so ter- 
 rible a fate. 3 The old heroic families of Greece had 
 become, or were supposed to have become, extinct; 
 and hence mythology is full of tales of the crimes, by 
 which they had brought on themselves the vengeance 
 of the gods. Troy had perished for the perjury of 
 Laomedon ; the Pelopidse, for the crimes of Atreus 
 
 1 Faber, Pagan Idolatry, ing Berigonium in Argyle- 
 2. 180. quoting Ksempfer's shire. The vitrified walls 
 Japan. were supposed to bear marks 
 
 2 Faber, u. s. p. 176. of destruction by lightning, 
 
 3 In the Transactions of Roy. and this was attributed to the 
 Soc. Lit. 2, 251, is an account wickedness of the inhabi- 
 of a similar tradition respect- tants. 
 
CHRONOLOGY OF GENESIS. 43 
 
 and Tantalus ; the royal line of Thebes, for those of 
 Laius and GEdipus; the Phlegyse, for their sacrile- 
 gious invasion of the temple of Delphi. We con- 
 fine ourselves to historical argument, or we might 
 reasonably inquire whether, when God is said to 
 repent of having made mankind, and to determine 
 to destroy them for their wickedness, we really 
 hear the purposes and motives of the Divine Being 
 declared by himself, or man's imperfect notions, 
 clothed in his own anthropomorphic language. 
 
 But the question whether the belief in the ex- 
 istence of a Deluge has originated in speculation, 
 or the preserved remembrance of a fact, can hardly 
 be decided without adverting to chronology. If 
 an authentic chronology connected this event with 
 times and persons unquestionably historical, by an 
 interval so short, that tradition might preserve 
 the knowledge of a fact, the presumption would be 
 that it had been so preserved. We must, there- 
 fore, inquire whether we have any chronology on 
 which we can rely. No one but that which is 
 contained in the book of Genesis, has even the 
 appearance of authenticity; others betray them- 
 selves at once as the work of invention, by the 
 exaggeration of their numbers or the mythical 
 circumstances interwoven in them. There is, 
 
44 HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 however, an uncertainty in regard to the biblical 
 text, in all those passages from which we derive 
 the chronology, both of the period between the 
 Creation and the Deluge, and the Deluge and the 
 Birth of Abraham. Hence arise two questions, 
 which must be carefully kept distinct— what is the 
 true reading of the biblical text, and what cer- 
 tainty belongs to the chronology of the primaeval 
 times. 
 
 There are three principal sources, from which 
 the true text may be recovered ; the original He- 
 brew, the Septuagint version, and the Samaritan 
 copy of the Pentateuch, of which the language is 
 Hebrew, but the text varies considerably from the 
 Jewish copy, not only in the passages in question, 
 but throughout the five books of Moses. The 
 chronology is not reckoned backward or forward, 
 from the Creation or the Deluge, but is deduced 
 from the lives and generations of the Patriarchs, 
 as recorded in the history. According to the He- 
 brew text, 1656 years intervened between the 
 Creation and the Deluge ; according to the Sama- 
 ritan, 1307; according to the Septuagint, 2262; 
 from the Deluge to the Call of Abraham, is, ac- 
 cording to the Hebrew, 427 years ; according to 
 the Samaritan, 1077; according to the Septuagint, 
 
HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 45 
 
 1207; so that between the Creation and the 
 Call of Abraham, there elapsed, according to the 
 Hebrew, 2083 ; according to the Septuagint, 3469 
 years; making a difference of 1386 years. 1 The 
 Samaritan has found few advocates, but many 
 learned men have preferred the Septuagint to the 
 Hebrew, induced by the inconvenient narrowness 
 of the limits into which the Hebrew chronology 
 compresses the history of the world after the Flood. 2 
 A critical question, however, must be decided 
 wholly on critical grounds, and unless some reason 
 can be given for suspecting the integrity of the 
 Hebrew text, it claims that superior authority 
 which naturally belongs to an original, above a 
 version. A mere discrepancy in numbers, the 
 most easily corrupted of all the contents of ancient 
 MSS., is not in itself a reason for suspecting bad 
 faith on either side : but in this instance it is of 
 such a kind, as accidental corruption cannot ex- 
 plain. The variation is systematic. The Sep- 
 tuagint regularly adds 100 to the age of the father 
 at the time of the birth of his eldest son, and as 
 
 * l See the different reckon- pret. eorumque Chronologia 
 
 ings in Anc. Univ. Hist, vol.i. Dissertatio. Jackson's Chro- 
 
 p. 142—148, 252—258. nological Antiquities, 3 vols. 
 
 2 Isaac Vossius de Antiqui- 4to. Hale's New Analysis of 
 
 tate Mundi. Id. De 70. Inter- Chronology, 3 vols. 4to. 
 
46 HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 
 
 regularly takes 100 from the length, of his life, 
 after that event. It has besides inserted, between 
 Arphaxad and Salah, a second Cainan, to whom 
 130 years are attributed. These variations show, 
 that the text has been tampered with, and either 
 the Jews have shortened, or the Septuagint has 
 lengthened, all the genealogies. 
 
 That the reading of the Hebrew text was the 
 same in the age of the preaching of Christianity 
 as now, is fairly presumed from its correspondence 
 with the Chaldee paraphrase of Onkelos, made in 
 order that the Jews, who had lost the knowledge 
 of the pure Hebrew, might understand the reading 
 of the law. His age is uncertain/ but the fidelity 
 of his version, the absence of all fabulous addi- 
 tions, and the purity of his Chaldee idiom, confirm 
 the accounts of the Jewish writers, who place him 
 at the latest in the reign of Hadrian. From this 
 time to the age of St. Jerome, the latter part of 
 the 4th century after Christ, we find no positive 
 statement, in any Jewish or Christian writer, on 
 this subject ; but the old Syriac version (Peschito), 
 which must have been made in this interval, 
 agrees with the Hebrew text. St. Jerome, being 
 well skilled in Hebrew, detected and notices 2 the 
 
 1 Eichhorn, Einl. i. § 221. 2. 2 In Genes, op. 3, 320. 
 
HEBREW AND SEPTUAGINT CHRONOLOGY. 47 
 
 discrepancy ; but, in his own revision of the old 
 Latin version, which followed the Septuagint, and 
 had been made from it, adheres to the Hebrew. 
 If the Jews, after the preaching of the Gospel, had 
 altered their own text, the copies of the Hebrew 
 would probably have varied among themselves in 
 the age of Jerome, or at least some memorial must 
 have existed of so daring a fraud, and the learned 
 father could not have been ignorant of it. The 
 Hexapla of Origen, lost to us, were extant in his 
 day, and would have informed him, had such a 
 discrepancy existed a century and half earlier. 
 Eusebius, in his Chronicon, notices the difference, 
 but brings no charge of corruption against the 
 Hebrew text. In Chron. Can., p. 87, ed. Seal., he 
 is evidently speaking of chronological discrepancy, 
 in times subsequent to the birth of Jacob. The 
 complaints of such writers as Justin Martyr and 
 Epiphanius, that the Jews had corrupted their 
 scriptures, in order to take away from the Chris- 
 tians the arguments in defence of their faith, 
 would under any circumstances deserve little re- 
 gard, as they were ignorant of Hebrew. But they 
 never charge them specifically with shortening 
 the patriarchal chronologies ; they had in view 
 passages in the Psalms and Prophets, which they 
 
48 CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 
 
 thought the Jews had corrupted ; and even as to 
 these, their charge related not to the Hebrew, but 
 to the copies of the Septuagint, which was com- 
 monly read in the synagogues of the Hellenizing 
 Jews, instead of the Hebrew or Chaldee. Of the 
 falsehood of the imputation against the Jews, of 
 corrupting the scriptures, we can judge for our- 
 selves; the original text has come to us through their 
 hands, and not a single passage has been altered, 
 which was adduced by Christ and his Apostles as a 
 proof of the divine origin of the Gospel. Aquila 
 made a new version of the Old Testament into 
 Greek, probably with a view to take from the 
 Christians some of the arguments which they de- 
 rived from the Septuagint ; not, however, by any 
 corruption of the text, but a more literal rendering 
 of the Hebrew. The utmost that can be alleged 
 with truth, is, that the Jews point some words 
 differently, to evade the arguments of the Chris- 
 tians. I speak not of particular MSS., but the 
 general testimony of the Hebrew text. 
 
 The direct evidence on which they have been 
 charged with corrupting the genealogies is very 
 slight. 
 
 Kennicott (Diss. Gen. § 83) quotes a passage 
 attributed to Ephrem Syrus, about a.d. 350, from 
 
CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 49 
 
 an Arabic Catena (MS.) in the Bodleian, (Hunt. 
 84,) in which it is asserted that the Jews have 
 taken 100 years from the lives of Adam, Seth, 
 Enosh, Cainan, Mahaleel and Enoch, in all 600 
 years, " ut manifestationem Messise celarent, ne 
 libri eorum eos reprehenderent de Messise adventn, 
 apparituri post annos 5500, ut liberet hominem." 
 The MS. is of the year 1577, and I have not been 
 able to obtain any more precise information as to 
 the evidence on which this passage is attributed 
 to Ephrem, or the work from which it is quoted. 
 We have a Commentary of Ephrem in the Syriac, 
 on the Book of Genesis, in which he follows the 
 Hebrew reckoning, without intimating any diver- 
 sity in the Greek. " In celeberrima annorum 
 supputatione, ab orbe condito usque ad diluvium, 
 Hebraicum fontem sequitur Ephrsemus, et de 
 Grsecse lectionis diversitate ne verbum quidem fa- 
 cit." Assemann, Bibl. Orient, t. i. p. 65, quoted 
 by Bruns ad Kennicott, § 83. But even if Ephrem 
 really had asserted that the Jews had corrupted 
 the text, we must not too hastily conclude that he 
 possessed anything like a proof of it. It would 
 seem to a zealous partizan the most natural way of 
 accounting for the difference. The Archbishop of 
 
50 CHARGE OF CORRUPTION AGAINST THE JEWS. 
 
 Goa 1 directed the Indian Christians to restore to 
 their copies of the Syriac New Testament, the text 
 of the Heavenly Witnesses, " because it had been 
 suppressed by impiety." What value would any 
 critic attach to this assertion ? 
 
 Jacobus Edessenus, who nourished about the 
 year 700, makes the charge against the Jews, of 
 having taken 100 years from the age of Adam and 
 the other Patriarchs ; but instead of saying, as 
 Kennicott represents, that he had found some He- 
 brew copies which agreed with the Septuagint, 
 what he really says is, that he had found the age 
 of Adam, at the birth of Seth, given at 230 years, 
 " in some accurate Hebrew histories ;" on which 
 Bruns observes, " Nullus dubito quin ' Hebraicse 
 historian satis accurate/ valde similes fuerint Tar- 
 gumin istorum, quse hodie nomine Hierosolymitani 
 et Jonathan Ben Uzziel circumferuntur." This 
 he confirms from other passages. The Tar gum of 
 Jonathan Ben Uzziel was written, according to 
 Bruns, in the 6th century, at least not later. 
 
 The expectation of the Jews, according to the 
 Talmud, (Anc. Un. Hist. 3, 39,) was that the Mes- 
 siah should come when the Law had endured 2000 
 1 Porson, Letters to Travis, p. 173. 
 
MOTIVES FOR THE CORRUPTION OF THE GREEK. 51 
 
 years. According to the Septuagint Chronology, 
 the birth of Christ fell in the year of the world 
 5507, but as nothing is said in Scripture as to the 
 interval between this event and the Creation, it 
 does not appear why the Jews should corrupt 
 the text of Genesis, " ut manifestationem Messise 
 celarent." 
 
 We can see no motive then which should induce 
 the Jews systematically to shorten their own 
 chronology by laying violent hands upon their 
 scriptures; but when we advert to the circum- 
 stances under which the Septuagint translation 
 was made, we see obvious reasons why the Jews 
 of Alexandria should have wished to lengthen it. 
 They must have known that the Egyptians claimed 
 an antiquity for their nation and empire, with 
 which the short chronology of the Hebrew Scrip- 
 tures was quite irreconcileable. Manetho pub- 
 lished his Dynasties in the reign of Ptolemy Phila- 
 delphus ; and the first version of the Pentateuch 
 was made in the early part of the same reign. 
 But Manetho did not first reveal to the Egyptians 
 the fact of the high antiquity of their history : we 
 know from Herodotus 1 and Plato, that in their 
 times the foundation of the monarchy was carried 
 1 Herod, ii. 77. 
 d2 
 
52 MOTIVES FOR THE CORRUPTION OF THE GREEK. 
 
 back for many thousand years. To have placed 
 before the eyes of this people, and of the Greeks, 
 who had adopted their views, a chronology so brief 
 as that of the Hebrew text, would have been a 
 mortifying acknowledgment of inferiority. There 
 was little danger that the liberty taken by the 
 translators should be detected, in an age when 
 few possessed the power of comparing their labour 
 with the original. They might not be conscious 
 of any dishonest purpose ; they might believe that 
 a chronology at variance with that of the nation 
 most celebrated for historical knowledge, could 
 not be correct. But even if we must condemn 
 it as a sacrifice of truth to national vanity, there 
 is nothing in the character of the Alexandrian 
 Jews to raise them above such a suspicion. 
 On the contrary, they were adepts in literary 
 forgery, most of the Apocryphal books are with 
 reason attributed to them, and the story of the 
 origin of the Septuagint is an admitted fable. 
 
 The Samaritan copy of the Pentateuch agrees 
 with the Hebrew in regard to the first five gene- 
 rations from Adam, but varies in the age attributed 
 to Jared, Methuselah and Lamech, at the births 
 of their respective eldest sons. But in the time 
 of St. Jerome, the Hebrew and the Samaritan 
 
CHRONOLOGY OF THE SAMARITAN. 53 
 
 agreed in regard to the two last ; 1 and, therefore, 
 the reading of our present copies of the Samaritan 
 must have originated or superseded the other since 
 the 4th century. In the chronology of the post- 
 diluvian Patriarchs, the Samaritan omits Cainan, 
 and follows a different reckoning as to the time 
 which each patriarch survived the birth of his 
 son, but in regard to the father's age, at the 
 time when the son was born, it corresponds 
 with the Septuagint. It is well known that in 
 a multitude of passages of the Pentateuch, the 
 Septuagint and the Samaritan agree, against 
 the Hebrew, a phenomenon in respect to the 
 origin of which biblical critics are by no means 
 yet agreed. But the great majority of them bear 
 so strongly the marks of being arbitrary correc- 
 tions, designed to supply supposed deficiencies, or 
 to rectify supposed mistakes of the Hebrew, that 
 no reliance can be placed on those readings which 
 have the united authority of both of these copies, 
 where any probable motive to an arbitrary change 
 can be suggested. The Hellenizing Jews of Alex-- 
 andria, and the Samaritans who were established 
 there, were probably not in such hostile relations 
 
 1 Hieron. Qusest. in Gen. v. Chron. Mos. ante Diluvium, 
 3, 4, quoted by Michaelis de p. 131. 
 
54 CHRONOLOGY OF JOSEPHUS. 
 
 to each other as in Palestine, and their respective 
 copies of the Pentateuch may have been corrected 
 to bring them into harmony. 
 
 That the change was made in the chronology at 
 the time of the translation appears probable, from 
 its having been adopted by some writers who lived 
 in the interval between Ptolemy Philadelphus and 
 Josephus, e. g. Demetrius and Eupolemus. 1 No 
 one can read the extracts from these writers, and 
 compare them with the manner in which the real 
 heathens, Diodorus, for example, and Tacitus, speak 
 of the Jews, without perceiving that they are Jews 
 in disguise. This, however, is of no importance 
 to our present argument, since whether heathens 
 or Alexandrian Jews, they would of course employ 
 the Greek translation. Josephus, as he adopts 
 the chronology of the Septuagint, (only omitting 
 the second Cainan, and giving, with the Hebrew, 
 29 instead of 79 years to Nahor at the birth of 
 Terah,) may be regarded as evidence that the 
 Greek text was in his days nearly what it is at pre- 
 sent. But we cannot infer from his adoption of it, 
 either that there was then no difference between 
 the Hebrew and the Septuagint, or that on critical 
 grounds he gave the preference to the latter. 
 1 Euseb. Prsep. Ev. 9, 17. 21. 29. 30. 
 
CHARACTER OF JOSEPHUS. 55 
 
 That he was not wholly ignorant of Hebrew is 
 evident ; bnt whether he understood it so as to 
 read it fluently — above all, whether he wrote from 
 the Hebrew or the Greek — are questions which 
 learned men have answered differently. 1 His own 
 positive assertion, Ant. x. 6, 6, that he only trans- 
 lated the books of the Hebrews, would have had 
 great weight, had he not accompanied it by the 
 declaration, that he had neither added nor taken 
 away anything — whereas it is a notorious fact 
 that he has used great liberties both in adding 
 and suppressing. 2 But whether Josephus could 
 or could not read Hebrew so readily as to detect 
 a difference if it existed between the two texts, it 
 is little likely that he should have proclaimed it. 
 He wrote, not for his own countrymen, but for 
 heathen nations, and his ill-judging patriotism or 
 vanity induced him to soften down and pare away 
 from the authentic records whatever was likely to 
 offend or revolt them. Thus in the history of the 
 Deluge he suppresses the fact, that the Scriptures 
 represent it as destroying all but the family of 
 
 1 Among recent scholars, ship of Josephus. Eichhorn, 
 
 Ernesti Exerc. Flav. Opusc. A.T. 1. 349 note, against it. 
 364, and Michaelis Synt. 2 He speaks more vaguely, 
 
 Comm. 165, have decided in Proem. Ant. i. 2. 
 favour of the Hebrew scholar- 
 
56 THE HEBREW TEXT AUTHENTIC. 
 
 Noah. Ant. i. 141. What system of Chronology 
 warranted his assertion, Ant. Proem, i. 3, that 
 Moses was born 2000 years before his own time ? 
 Writing in such a spirit of compromise, and with 
 so little regard to truth, is it likely that he would 
 acknowledge, out of respect for the Hebrew verity, 
 that the original records of his nation contained a 
 chronology which the heathens would regard as 
 false, from its inconsistency with their own ? 
 
 We must then acquiesce in the conclusion, that 
 the Hebrew copies represent the original and 
 authentic text of the book of Genesis. We are not 
 at liberty, in a question purely critical, to give 
 weight to arguments of any other kind than those 
 by which the genuineness of readings in ancient 
 authors is decided. On historical grounds, very 
 formidable objections present themselves to the 
 Hebrew chronology. Without going beyond the 
 history itself, it must appear incredible, that a 
 little more than 400 years after the world was 
 dispeopled by the Flood, Abraham should have 
 found a Pharaoh reigning over the monarchy of 
 Egypt, and that the East, as far as its condition is 
 incidentally disclosed to us, should present no 
 trace of recent desolation, but is already occupied 
 and divided into communities, wherever the patri- 
 
DIFFICULTIES OF THE HEBREW CHRONOLOGY. 57 
 
 arch moves. The difficulties are still greater when 
 the Mosaic chronology is applied as a measure to 
 profane history. Half a century since, when Ma- 
 netho passed for an impostor, and Egyptian his- 
 tory was lengthened or shortened, to suit an 
 hypothesis, it was supposed that the thousand 
 years, gained by the substitution of the Greek for 
 the Hebrew numbers, gave ample time for all the 
 events of post-diluvian history, and this is still 
 the refuge of many writers ; but this ground is 
 no longer tenable. The Egyptian monuments and 
 records carry us to the beginning . of the third 
 millennium before the birth of Christ: and the 
 earliest glimpse we gain of the condition of man- 
 kind in this country, exhibits them as already far 
 advanced in civilization, and bearing no marks of 
 so recent an origin from a single family as even 
 the Septuagint chronology supposes. India, China, 
 Assyria, though their histories are not established 
 on evidence as irrefragable as that of Egypt, give 
 similar testimony to the high antiquity of civiliza- 
 tion, a condition of society which presupposes a 
 long period of progressive culture. 
 
 It is not, however, in these difficulties alone that 
 we find reason for doubting whether the genealogies 
 of the Book of Genesis, taken either according to 
 d5 
 
58 PATRIARCHAL GENEALOGIES NOT HISTORICAL. 
 
 the Hebrew or the Septuagint, furnish us with a real 
 chronology and history. The chain which extends 
 from Adam to Abraham is composed of persons 
 whose life is said to have exceeded, sometimes in a 
 tenfold degree, the present average of human life. 
 If we build a chronology on this, we fall again 
 into the fallacy of assuming the supernatural as 
 the proof of the historical. Such a prolongation 
 of human life is a perpetual miracle. It is con- 
 trary to all analogy that living beings, the same in 
 species, should differ from each other in length of 
 life by several centuries. When a naturalist col- 
 lects the proofs of identity of species, he does 
 not fail to include conformity in the duration of 
 life. Beings whose lives extended to nearly 1000 
 years must have been physically, morally and 
 intellectually different from ourselves, whose aver- 
 age does not exceed three score years and ten. 
 They cannot, therefore, have been our progenitors. 
 If, to avoid this difficulty, we suppose that year 
 meant some other length of time than twelve 
 months in this part of the history, we cut ourselves 
 off from all possibility of establishing a chrono- 
 logy, the value of its unit being uncertain. If we 
 say that there is some error in the reckoning, we 
 undermine the authority of a document, into 
 
CHRONOLOGY INFLUENCED BY POPULAR NOTIONS. 59 
 
 which we admit that so grave an error can have 
 crept. 
 
 We have already seen that the accounts of the 
 Creation and the subsequent history of the world, 
 have come down to us in the form of popular tra- 
 dition, and that consequently we are not to expect 
 in them that accuracy which belongs to a history 
 founded on documentary and monumental evi- 
 dence. The early chronology of all nations is 
 equally characterized by the influence of popular 
 conceptions. With a feeling akin to the pride of 
 family, they endeavour to deduce their own lineage 
 in direct descent from the jwotoplastce of the hu- 
 man race. Thus the Hindus attribute the origin 
 of their institutions and race to Menu, whose 
 name is equivalent to man. The Germans made 
 Tuisto (Teutsch) and his son Mannus to be the 
 origin and founders of their nation. The Hebrew 
 language has two names for man, Adam DTK, and 
 Enosh t£0&; and accordingly we have a double 
 genealogy of Lamech in Genesis, one tracing him 
 through Methuselah, Enoch, Jared, Mahaleel, and 
 Cainan to Enos ; the other through Methusael, Me- 
 hujael, Irad, Enoch and Cain to Adam. Ch. iv. 17 ; 
 v. 9—27. They are virtually the same in their steps, 
 though the orthography is a little varied, and Enoch 
 is transposed. To give primaeval antiquity to their 
 
60 CHRONOLOGY INFLUENCED BY POPULAR NOTIONS. 
 
 language and institutions, and connect themselves 
 with the origin of all things, by an unbroken chain 
 of chronology, has been an object of ambition to 
 ancient nations ; but they have attained this ob- 
 ject in different ways. If familiar with the powers 
 of numbers and the cycles of astronomy, as the 
 Chinese, Indians, Egyptians and Mexicans, and 
 surrounded by monuments of hoary antiquity, they 
 compute their own age by thousands and tens of 
 thousands of years, extending beyond all proba- 
 bility the commencement of their history. If, on 
 the contrary, like the Jews, they have no great mo- 
 numents of former days, no scientific culture, and 
 few and brief historical traditions, they bring down 
 the sera of creation as near as possible to their 
 own times and the shorter series of numbers 
 with which they are familiar. A chronology 
 which rests only on genealogy, even supposing it 
 to be historical, is especially liable to arbitrary 
 contraction; as the whole descent becomes bur- 
 densome to the memory, steps are left out, and an 
 artificial compactness is given to the table, some- 
 times by insertion, but more frequently by omis- 
 sion. 1 Oriental history is wont to shorten genealo- 
 gical registers in order to help the memory, and 
 
 1 Monumenta antiquissima horn, § 7, p. 18. 
 Historise Arabum ed. Eich- 
 
UNCERTAINTY OF GENEALOGIES. 61 
 
 make the great grandfather the immediate parent 
 of the great grandson. This is the practice of the 
 Arabs, and probably also of the Jews. Noah, 
 Gen. v., is made the tenth in descent from Adam ; 
 Abraham, Gen. xi., the tenth from Shem. So in 
 the genealogy in Matthew, the three periods from 
 Abraham to David, from David to the Captivity, 
 and from the Captivity to Christ, are made each 
 to comprise fourteen generations. The Greek 
 heroic genealogies ascend by only five, six or 
 seven generations from the war of Troy to the 
 commencement of history. 1 Were we to adopt 
 either the extended or the contracted scale as the 
 authoritative standard, by which all others are to 
 be corrected, we should involve ourselves in end- 
 less difficulties, and must either fill out vast spaces 
 with imaginary dynasties, or arbitrarily alter the 
 denominations of time, and reckon years as days, 
 or compress the events of centuries into years. 
 
 No evidence, therefore, remains, by which we 
 can fix the interval which elapsed between the 
 
 1 Commonly only four, fourth generation beyond the 
 
 Miiller, Orchomenos und die Trojan war. The royal fa- 
 
 Minyer, p. 137. "Homer's mily of Troy alone forms the 
 
 genealogies of his heroes all exception; Jupiter was an- 
 
 end in a god, a river, or some cestor in the seventh degree 
 
 unaccountable personage, in to Hector." — Mitf. Hist, of 
 
 the second, third, or at most Greece, i. 249. 
 
62 NO CHRONOLOGY OF PRIMEVAL TIMES. 
 
 origin of the human race and the commencement 
 of the special history of each nation. They must be 
 allowed to carry out their own chronology as far, 
 but no farther, into this obscure region, as they 
 can produce evidence to justify their claim. This 
 evidence must be, not popular tradition, but docu- 
 ments or monuments ; going upward from what is 
 connected, known, and fixed by proximity to the 
 historical times of other nations, to the more 
 broken and doubtful succession of the earliest 
 events. We shall thus be assured that we are 
 dealing with facts, and not with hypotheses, con- 
 secrated by antiquity and national belief, and at 
 the same time escape the risk of rejecting true 
 historical evidence, because it cannot be reconciled 
 with an arbitrary standard of credibility. 
 
 The consequence of the method which has been 
 commonly adopted, of making the Jewish chrono- 
 logy the bed of Procrustes, to which every other 
 must conform its length, has been, that credence 
 has been refused to histories, such as that of 
 Egypt, resting upon unquestionable documents; 
 and we have voluntarily deprived ourselves of at 
 least a thousand years, which had been redeemed 
 for us from the darkness of ante-historic times. 
 
 We may seem thus to be brought to the con- 
 
NO MATERIALS FOR PRIMEVAL HISTORY. 63 
 
 elusion, that there is not, and cannot be, such a 
 thing as primaeval history ; and this is true, in the 
 sense in which primeval history is commonly un- 
 derstood. The historian has not the same re- 
 sources as the geologist. He, establishing his own 
 conclusions upon the evidence of his own science, 
 has attained to more than negative results, and 
 has brought to light an order of succession in the 
 formation of the strata of the earth, and the pro- 
 duction of vegetables and animals, to which 
 nothing is wanting, to bring it within the desig- 
 nation of history, except some measure of time. 
 But the annals of man are not written in the im- 
 perishable records of nature. He must be his own 
 historian. To feel conscious of the relation in 
 which he stands to the past and the future ; to 
 devise the means of perpetuating thoughts and 
 events for the instruction of posterity, he must 
 have passed the first stages of social improvement. 
 And, as Time is ever at work to counteract his 
 efforts, crumbling the papyrus and mouldering 
 the inscribed stone, much of his earliest history 
 may have perished from the frailty of the material 
 on which it was recorded. 
 
 In denying an historical character to the tradi- 
 tions out of which so many nations have consti- 
 
64 MYTHIC FICTION. 
 
 tuted for themselves a primaeval history, we may 
 seem to indulge a spirit of arbitrary and wanton 
 scepticism. To justify us in refusing to them the 
 character even of materials for history, we must 
 direct attention to the wide influence of mythic 
 fiction, in producing what popular belief has ac- 
 cepted as a true narrative of facts. 
 
 Though we cannot in any country, except 
 those whose civilization is most recent, fix the 
 exact sera of the use of writing, we can per- 
 ceive everywhere a period when it was either 
 unknown, or so little used for historical pur- 
 poses, that fancy had a free range, in ascribing 
 to it what events it pleased. Hence the ante-his- 
 toric period of a nation is also the mythic. As 
 applied to the legends of early times, this word 
 must be distinguished from the fables which have 
 been devised for the illustration of the maxims of 
 prudence and morality, from the ornaments which 
 poetic imagination and taste bestow on the narra- 
 tive of facts, by the introduction of supernatural 
 agency, and from the fictions and exaggerations 
 which superstition and credulity introduce into 
 the accounts of even recent and altogether histo- 
 rical events. The mythi, which occupy the earliest 
 pages of the history of the principal countries of 
 
MYTHIC FICTION. 65 
 
 the ancient world, differ by one remarkable cha- 
 racter from those which we meet with even in his- 
 toric times ; the latter are commonly, though not 
 always, historical in their ground- work; the 
 former relate to a period of which, by supposition, 
 no history had been preserved, and may, therefore, 
 be wholly the work of imagination. Imagination 
 itself, however, has its laws ; it requires a motive 
 for its exertion, and the definite form which its 
 productions assume, implies a cause which has 
 given them this shape, rather than any other. 
 Some emotion usually awakens the activity of this 
 faculty ; curiosity, national pride and patriotism, 
 religious feeling ; and as these states of mind are 
 not solitary, but pervade many bosoms, and even 
 affect a whole nation, many minds are ready to 
 receive the mythic legends with sympathy and 
 faith, and to co-operate in their production. What 
 gives its definite form to the legend thus created 
 is something present to the senses, or permanent 
 in the feelings of those who produce or receive it. 
 But however much, by its vividness or its specialty, 
 it may put on the appearance of reality, it is still 
 essentially imaginative. The problem to be solved 
 is one of fact ; the solution, while it appears to be 
 historical^ may contain no fact at all. 
 
66 FICTION OF A GOLDEN AGE. 
 
 The error which has so extensively prevailed in 
 regard to these legends, and has procured them 
 credit, as containing the first chapters of primaeval 
 and national history, is the opinion that they were 
 produced in or near the age to which they refer, an 
 assumption which cannot be proved in regard to 
 any, and may be disproved of the greater number. 
 
 1. The mind acquiesces most reluctantly in the 
 imperfection or interruption of its knowledge of 
 the past, and whatever in the objects or institu- 
 tions which surround it, or of which it has learnt 
 the existence from history, is of sufficient import- 
 ance to excite emotions of wonder and curiosity, 
 is accounted for by mythic invention. We have 
 seen this with certainty in the case of the cosmo- 
 gonies of ancient nations, with probability in their 
 supposed traditions of the flood. The belief in a 
 golden age, which we find extensively prevalent, 
 appears, like these, to owe its origin to causes not 
 confined to any one nation, but inherent in human 
 nature, and, therefore, very generally producing 
 similar effects. It is the misery of the age of iron, 
 an age which includes the earliest period of history 
 as truly as our own, which has created the age of 
 gold. The severity of toil, the difficulty of sub- 
 sistence, the unequal distribution of wealth, the 
 
FICTION OF A GOLDEN AGE. 67 
 
 abuse of power, the injustice of man towards man, 
 and the whole train of evils which flow from 
 the physical condition of humanity and its moral 
 defects, have turned imagination towards a 
 time, when labour was not exacted, because the 
 earth yielded abundance for man's simple wants, 
 and the abuse of civilization had not yet awakened 
 artificial desires ; when laws were not needed be- 
 cause crimes were unknown; when everything be- 
 longed alike to all, and the gods lived in friendly 
 society with men. This belief has little in com- 
 mon with the scriptural account of the original 
 condition and subsequent fall of man ; the change 
 there described is individual and internal, and he 
 is not represented as existing in a social state, with- 
 out misery or crime. It is at once too widely 
 diffused in its essence, and too distinctly national 
 in its details, to have originated in one spot. The 
 time at which this condition of peace and virtue 
 is supposed to have existed, is separated by so 
 wide a chasm from everything historical, that we 
 cannot believe that any remembrance of it should 
 have been handed down, and in every country is 
 different ; we may add, that it is founded upon a 
 false assumption, that a state of inactivity, the 
 result of spontaneous abundance, is more favour- 
 
68 FICTION OF HAPPY RACES OF MEN. 
 
 able to human virtue and happiness, than the ob- 
 ligation to labour. We seek the source of this 
 belief, therefore, in the mind of man himself, 
 which endeavours to obtain relief from actual suf- 
 fering, in the contemplation of a state in which it 
 was unknown. As imagination passes the bounds 
 of all historic time to create such a condition, so 
 it places beyond the bounds of geographical know- 
 ledge, races of men superior in health, longevity 
 and virtue, to the inhabitants of the known parts 
 of the globe. Such were the Atlantians, the Hy- 
 perboreans, the Ethiopians. These fictions are 
 beautiful ; they prove that imagination has been 
 benevolently given to man, as an antagonist power 
 to the oppressive realities of social life, and that 
 he feels within himself the consciousness of good, 
 which, could it be extricated from the evil with 
 which it is encumbered, would render him worthy 
 to be the associate of divine natures. But we 
 must not seek for the original of these pictures in 
 history or in geography. 
 
 2. The nations which have admitted a plurality 
 of gods, have had a theogony as well as a cosmo- 
 gony, the events of which belong to their mythic 
 age. The connection which they may appear to 
 have with local and historical circumstances is 
 
THEOGONY AND HEROIC HISTORY. 69 
 
 evidently factitious ; for as the personages are ima- 
 ginary, the events cannot be real. In the more 
 refined and spiritual systems of polytheism, the 
 generation of the gods is little more than a symbo- 
 lical expression ; in the more anthropomorphic, it 
 assumes a nearer resemblance to historic fact, and 
 is adorned with circumstances, having their pro- 
 totype in human relations. Even in the very an- 
 thropomorphic system of the Greeks, there is a 
 portion which at once discloses its merely symbo- 
 lical character. "When it is said that Ouranos 
 (Heaven) first ruled over the whole world ; that he 
 married Ghe (the Earth), and that their offspring 
 were the hundred-handed giants ; or that Oceanos 
 was the progeny of the same parents; or that 
 Kronos (Time) devoured a long succession of his 
 own offspring, — it is evident that nothing real is 
 meant to be described, and that we have merely a 
 philosophical speculation in a transparent allego- 
 rical garb. These personages, indeed, though 
 called gods, were hardly objects of general national 
 belief or of divine rites. But the real gods of 
 popular belief, being more frequently presented 
 to the eye under the human form, having their 
 local abodes on earth, and being brought into ma- 
 nifold relations with actual life, were regarded by 
 
70 THEOGONY AND HEROIC HISTORY. 
 
 the majority of their worshippers as real persons, 
 and their agency was freely intermingled with that 
 of man, in a web of fiction which it is impossible 
 to unravel, so as to separate the mythic from the 
 historic threads. The course which has been 
 commonly pursued, to reject all as fabulous which 
 is supernatural, and admit all as true which is 
 possible, is altogether arbitrary, because fiction 
 may work with natural means, and within the 
 limits of the laws of nature as well as beyond 
 them. More than the possibility of a fact must 
 be established, to authorize its reception as matter 
 of history. The place which these personifications 
 and abstractions hold in the Greek mythology, 
 shows that we cannot even trust to it as an histo- 
 rical deduction of the progress of theological be- 
 lief. The real objects of the national faith in the 
 earliest ages to which we can ascend, Jupiter and 
 his kindred, appear as the latest in the order of 
 theogony. But there is no reason to believe that 
 the worship of another line of gods preceded that 
 of the descendants of Saturn. On the contrary, 
 Ouranos and his children appear to be entirely the 
 result of later speculation, and to have been placed 
 at the head of the theogony, in order to fill up the 
 chasm and connect the existing deities with the 
 
CONTEST OF GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLES. 71 
 
 origin of Heaven and Earth. The very forms of 
 their names betray the late date of the mythos ; 
 they are ordinary Greek ; while those of the 
 descendants of Saturn, though also of Greek root, 
 can be explained in general only from obsolete 
 and dialectic forms. In regard to other mytho- 
 logies, as the Indian and the Egyptian, in which 
 deities of a more spiritual character appear, in the 
 order of theogony, to precede those who come 
 nearer to humanity in their form, their passions 
 and their history, we may reasonably conclude 
 that they result from later refinement. Such is 
 the distinction between Braam and Brama, in the 
 Hindu theology. 1 Their apparent spirituality is 
 really their imperfect personification, itself the 
 consequence of their not having been objects of 
 popular belief, nor creations of the popular mind. 
 3. The mythology of several ancient nations, 
 represents the dominion of the gods as not having 
 been established, without struggles with powerful 
 enemies, by whom they even suffered partial and 
 temporary defeat. The general idea which such 
 mythi embody, is derived partly from the con- 
 flicting forces which are still active in nature, and 
 appear to have possessed even greater energy in 
 1 Moor, Hindu Pantheon, p. 3. 
 
72 CONTEST OF GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLES. 
 
 primaeval times, partly from the mixture of evil 
 with good, which pervades nature, providence and 
 human life. In the Greek mythology, in which a 
 moral element seldom appears, the conflict of the 
 gods with the Titans, denotes merely the slow and 
 reluctant submission of the vast and turbulent 
 powers of nature, to those laws by which the actual 
 system is preserved in harmony and order. The 
 giants, who endeavoured to storm heaven, and 
 were buried in the Phlegraean fields, in the Palle- 
 nian peninsula, or under Mount iEtna, represent 
 specifically the violent disturbance which volcanic 
 agency introduces. The Egyptian Typhon com- 
 bines physical and moral evil ; so does the Ahri- 
 man of the Zoroastrian mythology. The Hindus 
 have no such distinct and single personification 
 of the principle of evil ; but their preserving 
 god Vischnu becomes incarnate at intervals, 
 when either moral or physical evil is likely to 
 predominate. These fictions show, not only that 
 man has been universally conscious of the mixed 
 influences to which he is subject, but also of the 
 preponderance of the good. The Titans have been 
 cast down and imprisoned in Tartarus ; Typhocus 
 turns under the weight of iEtna, but cannot throw 
 it off. Typhon has been vanquished by Horus, and 
 
 
RACES OF GIANTS. 73 
 
 buried in the Serbonian bog. Ahriman still con- 
 tinues the contest with Ormuzd, but the power of 
 the evil principle has been already limited, and 
 will be ultimately overthrown. 
 
 The fiction of a race of giants, engaged in war- 
 fare with the gods, is so remote from all historical 
 probability, that its true nature is at once seen; 
 but it may be thought that there is something of 
 an historical foundation for the very prevalent 
 belief, that a race, of stature, strength and longe- 
 vity far surpassing that of later degenerate days, 
 has once occupied the earth, and even left on it 
 the traces of its existence in its mighty works. 
 We by no means deny the possibility that such a 
 race may have existed, but analogy does not 
 favour the supposition, and the direct evidence 
 will be found to be fallacious. We discover 
 among fossil remains, those of animals congene- 
 rous with such as now exist, far surpassing them 
 in size, but seldom, if ever, identical with them in 
 all other respects, except their size. Their species 
 is different, and therefore analogy is against the 
 conclusion that the human race has ever varied, 
 except within the limits of existing varieties ; 
 varieties which include Patagonians and Esqui- 
 meaux. The supposed remains of gigantic human 
 
 E 
 
74 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 bones, which afford to popular credulity an argu- 
 ment of their former existence, when examined, 
 prove to be those of cetaceous animals, or ele- 
 phants ; the traditions which ascribe great works 
 to them are only proofs how completely the re- 
 membrance of their real origin has been lost. 
 Looking upward from the base of the Great Py- 
 ramid, we might suppose it the work of giants ; 
 but it is entered by passages, admitting with diffi- 
 culty a man of the present size 5 and we find in the 
 centre a sarcophagus about six feet long. The 
 strength and stature of the men of past ages have 
 been exaggerated, from the same cause as their 
 happiness and their virtue, and each successive 
 generation has regarded itself as holding a middle 
 position between the highest and the lowest points 
 of the scale. Two men of Homer's day could have 
 lifted with difficulty the stones which the heroes 
 of the Trojan War hurled at each other with ease. 1 
 Virgil anticipated that the bones of those who fell 
 in the Civil Wars, when disinterred by posterity, 
 would be gazed at with wonder for their size. 2 
 
 4. Religious rites, from their connection with 
 the most solemn ideas which can occupy the 
 human mind, their supposed influence on the 
 1 II. E. 302. 2 Georg. 1, 497. 
 
ORIGIN OF RELIGIOUS RITES. 75 
 
 happiness of those who perform them, and the 
 high antiquity in which their origin is commonly 
 lost, have powerfully excited imagination, and 
 many mythic legends have been devised to explain 
 their origin and circumstances. They have, no 
 doubt, sometimes had an historic origin. For the 
 Jewish Passover, we have a cause assigned in the 
 deliverance from Egypt, an event belonging to an 
 historic age ; and it is incredible that a whole na- 
 tion should have been in error, in regard to a 
 transaction which so deeply affected them. 1 But 
 if we examine the majority of those legends which 
 are connected with the foundations of temples, the 
 institution of solemn rites and public festivities, 
 we shall find that they have much more the air 
 of being devised to explain certain peculiarities, 
 which had excited wonder and curiosity, than of 
 having been handed down, side by side with the 
 practices themselves. At the temple of Papremis, 
 in Egypt, dedicated to Mars, it was customary, on 
 one evening of the year, that the votaries of the 
 god should force an entrance for his shrine and 
 statue into the sanctuary, and that the priests 
 
 1 The circumstance men- the appointment of circumci- 
 
 tioned in Gen. xxxii. 32, is a sion, (Gen. xvii. 9 ; Exod. iv. 
 
 remarkable contrast to this. 24,) which was not an exclu- 
 
 So are the various accounts of sively Jewish rite. 
 
 E 2 
 
76 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 should resist ; and lives were lost, as Herodotus 
 relates/ in the sanguinary affray which ensued ; 
 symbolical, as it should seem, of the warlike at- 
 tributes of the god. The kpdg \6yog of the temple 
 represented it as originating in the endeavour of 
 Mars to force his way to an interview with his 
 mother, and the resistance of the priests, to whom 
 he was unknown. The Eleusinian festival ex- 
 hibited a singular mixture of mournful rites with 
 the most unbridled licentiousness of the tongue 
 and gesture, not unnatural, as both death and life, 
 joy and sorrow, the apparent destruction of the 
 seed in winter and its germination in the spring, 
 were symbolized in these mysteries. The sacred 
 legend of the place referred the custom to the 
 coarse pleasantries with which a woman had dissi- 
 pated the grief of the goddess, when she had 
 arrived at Eleusis, seeking her lost daughter. The 
 Syrians abstained from fish, probably from dietetic 
 motives, but their abstinence was explained by a 
 legend of the conversion of their great goddess 
 into a fish. 2 Such explanations, as they assume 
 the existence of personages whom we know to be 
 
 i Her. 2, 63. undas, Anguipedem alatis hu- 
 
 2 Scilicet in piscem sese Cy- meris Typhona furentem. Ma- 
 
 therea novavit, Quum Baby- nil. Astron. iv. 580. Comp. 
 
 loniacas summersa profugit in Tzetz. Chil. 275. 
 
NATURAL PHENOMENA. 77 
 
 fictitious, will not now be received as history ; but 
 fiction, though it finds a clearer field in ages of 
 which no history existed, avails itself also of the ob- 
 scurity of periods within historical limits. The 
 builder of the third pyramid, Mycerinus or Men- 
 kare, is an historical personage, but his age was 
 as obscure to the Greek interpreters and the 
 Egyptians generally in the time of Herodotus, as 
 if he had been wholly mythic. Hence a legend 
 had been invented, to account for one of the cere- 
 monies of the worship of Isis, and related as an 
 historical anecdote of him and his daughter. 1 
 
 5. Extraordinary appearances in nature excite 
 wonder and curiosity; if they are of a transient kind, 
 momentary supernatural agency is called in to ex- 
 plain them ; if permanent, a mythic legend usually 
 attaches itself to them. A fetid scum was occasion- 
 ally thrown up on the shores of Sicily, which was 
 explained as the consequence of the Sun's stabling 
 his horses in those Western regions. 2 But the 
 same legend had a more historic form; trans- 
 ferred to the Peloponnesus, Augeas (avyh) the son 
 of the Sun was substituted for the Sun himself, 
 and the cleansing of the stable was deemed a la- 
 bour worthy of Hercules. 3 The rocks of Sipylus 
 
 * Herod. 2, 130. 2 Sen. Nat. Quest. 3, 26. 3 Apollod. 2, 5 
 
78 
 
 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 bore a fantastic resemblance to a weeping woman ; 
 Niobe was said to have been converted into stone. 1 
 A well in the Acropolis of Athens had an unseen 
 communication with the sea, and furnished salt 
 water ; it was supposed to have been produced by 
 Neptune, who having* the epithet of Erechtheus, 
 (or the shaker ',) it was also attributed to an ancient 
 king of that name. 2 The river which ran by 
 Byblos into the sea, assumed, in summer, the ap- 
 pearance of being stained with blood, owing to a 
 stratum of red earth, found in Libanus, which 
 the winds, at that season, carried in large quan- 
 tities into the stream ■ the legends of the country 
 attributed the phenomenon to the wound of the 
 god Adonis. 3 The habits or forms of animals, 
 if they presented anything uncommon to excite 
 the fancy, gave rise to mythic explanations. The 
 tinge of red on the swallow's breast was explained 
 as the bloody trace of the murder of Itys ; 4 as the 
 Mahometans explain the red legs of the pigeon, 
 from the mud which remained on them, when the 
 dove was sent forth from the ark. In short, there 
 is nothing of an unusual kind, even the existence 
 of a tree, the growth of unknown centuries, which, 
 
 Pausanias, 1,21. 3 Luc. D. Syr. 8. op. 9, 91 
 
 Pausanias, 1, 26. 4 Ovid, Met. 6, 668. 
 
TRANSMISSION OF NATIONAL CUSTOMS. 79 
 
 to a people of lively imagination, does not serve as 
 the material of a mythic legend. Most of them 
 are of so romantic a cast, that their fictitious 
 origin is evident at once ; others approaching more 
 to an historical character, have been admitted as 
 having at least a foundation in fact. But they 
 usually betray themselves. The fifth labour of 
 Hercules, for example, if treated as entirely the 
 work of fancy, beyond the natural appearance 
 which gave rise to it, may not appear a very grace- 
 ful fiction ; but belonging wholly to the imagina- 
 tion and to supernatural beings, we seek for no 
 congruity or proportion in it. But how absurd 
 does it become, if received as the history of the 
 labour of an ancient Grecian hero, in cleansing 
 the stable of a neighbouring king ! 
 
 6. Another cause which has filled the ante-his- 
 toric age with mythic tales, is the desire to explain 
 the transmission of national customs, religious 
 dogmas and rites from one country to another. 
 The historical events which caused the strong re- 
 semblances in these points, which we find, between 
 Greece, Asia Minor, Phoenicia, Egypt, and even 
 India, are as little known as those which caused 
 the affinities of language, nor is every resemblance 
 
80 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 a proof of transmission. But in ancient times it 
 was assumed that transmission was the cause, nor 
 was it enough that this transmission should be re- 
 ferred to unknown ages and persons; definite 
 names and circumstances were necessary, to satisfy 
 the propensity of the mind, rather to cheat itself 
 with fiction, than acquiesce in entire ignorance, or 
 the bare knowledge of a general fact. No nation 
 carried this further than the Greeks, who, while 
 they received everything from foreigners, wished to 
 appear as the authors of all they had borrowed. 
 Their Hercules had gone to Lydia, to Phoenicia, to 
 Egypt, to Libya, to Gades, wherever his worship 
 was found established. Their Bacchus had led 
 his train, or carried his conquests, wherever a god 
 was adored with frantic orgies and phallic rites, or 
 wherever a Nysa was found. Their lo had been 
 carried to Phoenicia, and been placed at the head 
 of the Egyptian Pantheon, under the name of 
 Isis. These legends long passed for history ; but 
 they were too repugnant to established facts, re- 
 specting the relative antiquity of the Greek reli- 
 gion and those of the East, to retain this authority. 
 The same principle of explanation, however, has 
 wrought by less obvious methods ; and much that 
 
ORIGIN OP LAWS AND ARTS. 81 
 
 is still received as history, already begins to ap- 
 pear as mythic, as the wanderings of Io, or the 
 Indian expedition of the Theban Bacchus. 
 
 7. The origin of society, the establishment of 
 law, the invention of the arts, like the origin of 
 the world, eluded historical research, and mytho- 
 logy was called in to supply the deficiency. The 
 learned work of Goguet, 1 in which are collected 
 all the traditions which the ancients have left us 
 on these subjects, affords ample proof of their un- 
 certainty. We know what nations excelled and 
 preceded others in civilization ; but when we at- 
 tempt to go beyond these general facts, and assign 
 institutions, usages and arts to definite persons 
 and dates, we perceive directly that there is no 
 historical evidence. Custom ripens into law, law 
 is invested with the sanction of religion, art ad- 
 vances by imperceptible degrees from rudeness to 
 perfection, and all these changes have taken place 
 before an\ historian is in being to record them. 
 If customs and laws are in accordance with the or- 
 dinary practice of mankind, and dictated by public 
 benefit, they are attributed to human legislation. If 
 apparently repugnant to these, a mythic origin is 
 assigned to them, as the Egyptians referred their 
 
 1 Origin of Laws, Arts and Sciences, 3 vols. Eng. Transl. 1775. 
 E 5 
 
82 MYTHIC FICTIONS, 
 
 intermarriage of brothers and sisters to the union 
 of Isis and Osiris. 1 Etymology often shows us 
 that the supposed name of the inventor is only a 
 personal expression of the fact of the invention. 
 The name of Jubal denotes a musical sound ; that 
 of Tubal-cain, an artificer in brass. The Na'po7r£e, 
 to whom the first working in brass is ascribed, 
 (Clem. Strom. 307,) have been fixed upon, because 
 vCjpoxp (Horn. II. ]3'. 578, et passim,) is an epithet 
 of that metal. The art of grinding was said to 
 have been first found out at Alesise, (a\£<rai, to 
 grind,) in the Peloponnesus, by Myles, (fivXri, a 
 millstone,) son of Lelex. Daedalus signifies the 
 skilful; Prometheus, the ingenious. Each nation 
 seeks to appropriate the glory of these inventions 
 to itself j and those which are known to have been 
 indebted to others for their civilization, are not 
 the most backward in claiming originality. If we 
 believe the Greeks, 2 the use of fire, of grain, the 
 art of making bread, the establishment of laws, 
 the institution of marriage, metallurgy, the fabri- 
 cation of tools, shipbuilding, navigation, medicine, 
 astronomy, were all invented by their gods or the 
 forefathers of their race, and within the limits of 
 their country. Their fictions had a fictitious con- 
 1 Diod. 1, 27. 2 Goguet, 1, 159. 
 
ORIGIN OF LAWS AND ARTS. 83 
 
 gruity, and even probability ; they did not ascribe 
 these wonders to ordinary men, but to demigods 
 and heroes, of whose powers, either of mind or 
 body, those of ordinary humanity furnished no 
 standard ; they believed themselves to be the au- 
 tochthones of the soil, on which they had lived 
 from the origin of all things, and therefore natu- 
 rally presumed that the whole history of the human 
 race, in its successive stages of civilization, was 
 included in their own. Had they lived in a state 
 of insulation from the rest of the world, we might 
 have admitted their claim to these inventions, 
 although it would still have been obvious, that the 
 whole history and chronology of their introduction 
 was fictitious. But Greece was separated from 
 Asia, where the arts were of immemorial antiquity, 
 by a strait not wider than an sestuary; it was 
 visited by the fleets of the Phoenicians, and there- 
 fore no one, with whom national pride does not 
 supersede all evidence, can admit that any of these 
 inventions were really made by the Greeks. But 
 can we place more confidence in Phoenician le- 
 gends, 1 when they tell us that Ousous first taught 
 men to use the skins of beasts for clothing, and 
 ventured to sea in a wooden canoe ; that Chrysor 
 1 Sanchoniathon ap. Euseb. Praep. Evang. 1, 10. 
 
84 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 invented rafts and fishing-tackle ; the Cabiri, navi- 
 gation; Dagon, agriculture ; Technites and Au- 
 tochthon, the art of brickmaking; Cronos, wea- 
 pons of iron ? Or have the Babylonians more 
 claim to be believed, when they represent their 
 progenitors as living on the spontaneous produc- 
 tions of the land and the marsh, till Oannes ap- 
 peared and taught them every thing that per- 
 tained to civilized life ? l Or are we to receive as 
 history the Egyptian account of Osiris, 2 who, with 
 his wife Isis, introduces the use of grain and the 
 culture of the vine, and travels over the world, to 
 communicate to its inhabitants the blessings of 
 civilization ? Even if no names are assigned, and 
 no supernatural agency is introduced, this does 
 not alter the unreal character of the legend. The 
 speculation of Lucretius, (v. 1255,) that the first 
 smelting of metals was the result of an accidental 
 conflagration among the mountains, was a mythos, 
 (Strabo. 3. p. 147,) in regard to the mountains of 
 Iberia. These various traditions neutralize each 
 other; and leave us only the conclusion, that 
 the real origin of all these arts and institu- 
 tions, the names of their inventors, and the cir- 
 cumstances of their introduction to the world, 
 1 Euseb. Chron.p.6. ed. Scol. 2 Diodorus, 1, 17, 18. 
 
 
FOUNDERS OF STATES AND CITIES. 85 
 
 were as unknown in the earliest times of historical 
 composition, as they are in our own. 
 
 It might be expected that this ignorance would 
 cease with the establishment of civilized commu- 
 nities, and that though the general history of 
 mankind was lost, each nation had preserved, 
 free from mythological mixture, the time and 
 manner of its own origin, and the names and 
 deeds of its own early kings and legislators. Yet 
 such an instantaneous transition from fiction to 
 history, from uncertainty to certainty, is not in 
 itself probable, nor is it at all accordant with the 
 character of the earliest special histories. The 
 names which they contain, sometimes appear to 
 have been derived from the name of the nation 
 itself, as the Pelasgus, Ion, Dorus, iEolus, Hellen 
 of the Greeks, who represent the names of the 
 different tribes of Greece ; or from the names of 
 the capital cities of monarchies, as the Egyptian 
 Menes is supposed to have founded Memphis; 
 Ninus, Nineveh ; and Romulus, Rome ; or from a 
 river or a mountain in its neighbourhood. The 
 principal god of the mythology of the country 
 sometimes appears as an historical personage in 
 the obscure commencement of history; thus Bel, 
 the chief god of Phoenicia and Assyria, has been 
 
86 MYTHIC FICTIONS. 
 
 converted into a king, Belus; and Semiramis is 
 probably nothing else than an historical meta- 
 morphosis of the great Syrian goddess Derceto. 1 
 States appear to have slowly consolidated them- 
 selves, and the true history of their progress was 
 either never recorded, or had been lost before 
 curiosity was awakened to inquire into it. Cities 
 were formed by the gradual aggregation of 
 jdwellings, and had either no founder, in the sense 
 in which we apply that name to Alexander and 
 Constantine, or had existed so long, in progressive 
 stages, before a founder was inquired about, that 
 no trace of him was preserved. In such a state 
 of ignorance, to suppose a founder, whose name 
 resembled that of the city, was a most obvious 
 resource. It may be that in the age when the be- 
 lief originated, such a practice was not without 
 example ; but the mere allegation of the founder's 
 name, unless the circumstances of the supposed 
 foundation have an historical character, does not 
 warrant the belief in his existence. The gods of 
 those nations whose worship was anthropomor- 
 phic, had been so completely invested with a 
 human form, attributes and history, that it was 
 
 1 Transactions of the Lit. ter, vol. iii. 2nd Series. 
 and Philos. Soc. of Manches- 
 
MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 87 
 
 almost a necessary consequence that they should 
 be supposed, at last, to have once been human 
 beings ; and if so, who should have been more 
 worthy of elevation to divinity, than the founder of 
 the city or the kingdom, the warrior under whom 
 their progenitors had conquered, or the chief who 
 had led them to the country which they occupied ? 
 Thus while the fact was, that the god had been 
 brought down to the character of a mortal founder 
 or chief, the mortal was supposed to have been 
 raised to the rank of deity for his eminent services. 
 If an epithet of the god, from its antique form, or 
 obsolete root, lost its primary significance, it often 
 happened, that he entered the list of kings or 
 heroes, entirely in an historical character ; or else 
 remained, under his familiar appellation, in the 
 council of the gods, while the unknown epithet 
 furnished a king to the national annals. Thus, 
 even when we have reached the historic age, the 
 shadowy personages of mythology are still inter- 
 mingled with its realities. 
 
 The mythic age is no definite period ; it has no 
 chronology, except what has been given to it by 
 those who, mistaking it for history, have endea- 
 voured by arbitrary means to distribute its events 
 in a probable succession, and connect them with 
 
88 MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 
 
 the historic age. From the circumstances of its 
 creation, it is always referred to the earliest time 
 at which a nation believes itself to have existed, 
 but the mythic age of one country may fall within 
 the historical times of another. The sovereigns of 
 Egypt had raised monuments and inscribed them 
 with representations of their exploits, and the 
 chronology of their reigns, while Greece, accord- 
 ing to its own mythology, was still peopled by 
 demigods, and miracles were events of every 
 day. From the Dorian Conquest downwards, 
 Greece has a history; from the middle of the 
 8th century before Christ, a chronology ; but 
 even at the sera of the Olympiads, all is mythic 
 legend in the history of Rome. Odin, according 
 to Northern mythology, was leading his hosts from 
 Asia to Scandinavia, and displaying the united 
 attributes of a god, a warrior and a magician, at 
 a time when the great men of Rome had learnt to 
 treat Jupiter as a fable. It is fruitless labour to 
 endeavour to establish synchronisms between my- 
 thic and mythic, or mythic and historic times, 
 to assign Danaus and Cadmus their place in the 
 royal families of Egypt and Phoenicia ; to accom- 
 modate the foundation of Rome to the capture of 
 Troy, or settle what proconsul, by his Asiatic vie- 
 
MYTHIC AGE NO DEFINITE PERIOD. 89 
 
 tories, drove Odin and his Ases into Scandinavia. 
 Learning, acuteness, invention, mathematical skill, 
 have been employed for ages in this task, but 
 with no other result than to prove that what is 
 fictitious in its origin, can never be brought into 
 permanent union with history. Broken fragments 
 may be reunited and restored ; even a quicksand 
 may be made to support a solid edifice ; but who 
 can give a foundation to a castle in the air ? 
 
 We cannot, therefore, adopt the old division 
 of past time into the uncertain, the mythic and the 
 historic, 1 as comprehending three distinct and suc- 
 cessive stages. In Egypt, for example, the histo- 
 rical period begins with Menes ; all that precedes 
 it, belongs to the uncertain. The people must 
 have existed previously, and must have had a his- 
 tory, but all its events are to us uncertain, though 
 we may hope, by probable inferences from lan- 
 guage, &c, to recover some general facts respecting 
 them. But the mythic period, the reign of gods 
 and demigods, is altogether imaginary, and it is 
 only an arbitrary interpretation which would give 
 it an historical character, as if it denoted the 
 ascendancy of the priests. The reason why a 
 mythic period so commonly precedes the historic, 
 1 Varro ap. Aug. Civ. Dei, 18, 10. 
 
90 TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 
 
 is, that the questions which, mythology employs 
 itself in solving, often relate to matters really ante- 
 cedent to history, and that its fictions would be 
 too rudely encountered by facts, if not placed in a 
 period of which no facts are recorded. 
 
 The belief in the reality of mythic times and 
 persons has so long held possession of the mind, 
 that it acquiesces with great reluctance in conclu- 
 sions which deprive us of so much that we have 
 been accustomed to regard as at least substantially 
 true. But though we cannot make mythic legends 
 into history, there is much historical knowledge 
 to be gained from them, when we have once seized 
 the true point of view from which they are to be 
 considered. They are proofs of the existence of a 
 certain popular belief, and the circumstances 
 which gave rise to it may be historical, though 
 not the story in which it has been embodied. 
 We may discard from our minds all belief in the 
 personality and adventures of Cadmus ; there will 
 still remain the fact, that the Greeks believed 
 themselves to owe some of their gods and their 
 civilization to Phoenicia ; and this belief could not 
 have arisen, had there not been strong marks of 
 affinity between their arts and religion, and deep 
 traces of an early intercourse. iEneas and his 
 
TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 91 
 
 adventures,, whether in Troy, in Libya, or in Italy, 
 may be wholly mythic ; and yet the fact will re- 
 main, that those who framed the legend of his 
 migration, saw resemblances which led them to 
 ascribe an iEolic origin to the Palladium and the 
 Penates. When the Greeks made Dorus and 
 iEolus the sons of Hellen, Achseus and Ion his 
 grandsons, they were influenced by the fact, that 
 all the Hellenes were closely united in religion, 
 manners and language, but that the iEolian and 
 Dorian tribes had more of the rudeness of primi- 
 tive antiquity than the Achseans and lonians. If 
 there be no reason to suppose that the belief of 
 the Scandinavians in their own Asiatic origin, 
 was an etymological inference from the name of 
 Ases, or subsequent to their knowledge of the 
 scriptural accounts of the diffusion of mankind, 
 its existence would be a fact of great historical 
 value, though Odin should be classed with purely 
 mythic personages. The walls of Tiryns and Argos 
 might have been justly concluded to be of colossal 
 architecture and unknown antiquity, from the 
 legend which ascribed them to the Cyclops, had 
 no vestige of them remained. And when it is added, 
 that these gigantic artificers came from Lycia, 
 we learn not the fact of the builders having really 
 
92 TRUE RELATION OF MYTHOS TO HISTORY. 
 
 migrated thence, but of the acknowledged priority of 
 the Asiatic country in the cultivation of art, perhaps 
 of early colonization. 1 These are properly histo- 
 rical inferences ; but the use of mythology, rightly 
 understood, to the historian, is not confined to 
 these. As a product rather of the national than 
 the individual mind, it gives a vivid image of na- 
 tional character. Religious and moral feeling, 
 knowledge, taste, the predominance of plastic or 
 reflective power among the intellectual faculties, 
 in ages from which no literary works have de- 
 scended to us, may all be traced in the creations 
 of mythology; and for this true picture of the 
 people with whom they originated, we may well 
 resign that delusive appearance of history, which 
 is obtained by stripping away from them what is 
 supernatural and absurd. 
 
 If we thus abandon all hope of extracting from 
 tradition, or deducing from written records, those 
 precise dates, facts and localities which alone could 
 constitute a history of primaeval times, nothing 
 would seem to be left, but to receive the existence 
 of the great oriental monarchies with which special 
 history begins, as facts, the consequences of which 
 we have to develop, without speculation on their 
 1 Eur. Or. 963. Paus. 2, 25. Strab. 8. 572. Apollod. 2, 2. 
 
TRUE IDEA OF PRIMAEVAL HISTORY. 93 
 
 causes. But the history of Man is the result of 
 his moral, intellectual and physical being, and the 
 influences to which he has been subjected by his 
 relation to the system of Nature, of which he 
 forms a part. To contemplate these relations is, 
 therefore, to qualify ourselves for understanding 
 his history. Further, in those great monarchies 
 whose connection with the earliest movements 
 and combinations of the human race we believe 
 to be irrecoverably lost, we find an agreement in 
 certain remarkable characters, the origin of which 
 is reasonably sought in some general principles of 
 our common nature ; since the special circum- 
 stances of country and race under which they 
 appear, are too various to admit of our attributing 
 the cause to them. What has been commonly 
 called conjectural history, has been unsatisfactory, 
 because it has proceeded upon unproved assump- 
 tions respecting the primitive condition of man- 
 kind, and has been carried out by means of doubt- 
 ful analogies. But if we assume nothing except the 
 facts which constitute our earliest historical know- 
 ledge, and seek to explain them from the faculties 
 and affections of man, which in all ages are the 
 same, we shall approach as nearly to a knowledge 
 of primaeval history, as we can do in the entire 
 
94 RELATION OF MAN TO THE UNIVERSE. 
 
 absence of positive testimony. To these two in- 
 quiries, the remaining pages of this Essay will be 
 devoted. 
 
 The relations of Man to Nature are such as to 
 show that he has been adapted by his Creator to 
 the place which he occupies ; they harmonize with 
 his powers and functions, and tend to the preser- 
 vation of his own race, and of the other animated 
 beings who are joined with him in the possession 
 of the earth. 1 This harmony and adaptation are 
 seen even in the laws which our globe obeys, as a 
 portion of the solar system. If man could have 
 existed at all, in a planet receiving so small a por- 
 tion of heat from the Sun, or revolving around him 
 in so long a period as Jupiter or Saturn, the de- 
 velopment of his nature, under such different in- 
 fluences, must have produced a series of events 
 wholly unlike his actual history. 2 Even the spe- 
 cial phenomena of this history are connected with 
 the cosmical relations of the earth. A slight 
 change in the obliquity of its axis, and the con- 
 sequent position of the tropics, would have placed 
 Ethiopia beyond, or Nubia and Egypt within, the 
 range of the annual rains. In the former case, 
 
 1 Paley, Nat. Theol. Ch. 17. 2 Herder Ideen zur Philoso- 
 vii. phie der Geschichte, i. 7. 
 
RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 95 
 
 there would have been little or no deposit of fer- 
 tilizing soil along the course of the Nile, and the 
 whole history of civilization in the Western half of 
 the globe would have been changed. On the other 
 hand, had Egypt been subject to those violent alter- 
 nations of drought and moisture which belong to a 
 tropical climate, its monuments must have perish- 
 ed before they had received their interpretation. 
 If the Gulf Stream had not wafted the pro- 
 ductions of America to the limits 1 of Europe, 
 Columbus might never have discovered the exist- 
 ence of a western continent. 
 
 The influence of physical causes on the condition 
 of man increases, as he is brought into nearer con- 
 nection with them, in the structure of the globe, 
 the surface of which has been the theatre of his 
 history. The form of the ocean, and the distribu- 
 tion of the two elements of land and water, have 
 promoted or retarded the diffusion of the human 
 race, and their arts and knowledge. Seas of 
 limited extent, like the Mediterranean and the 
 iEgean, the Arabian and Persian Gulfs, have faci- 
 litated the early intercourse of mankind : oceans, 
 like the Southern Pacific or Atlantic, have pre- 
 sented a barrier which only scientific navigation 
 1 Robertson's America, Book i. 
 
96 RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 
 
 could pass. Had the earth lain, according to the 
 early conception of it, a round disk in the midst 
 of the waters, 1 its immense continent would pro- 
 bably have exhibited the same monotony and 
 uniformity of life which now pervades Central 
 Asia and Africa. Had it been entirely broken up 
 into islands, the march of conquest and the great 
 combinations of empire would have been pre- 
 vented. 
 
 A great change either in the proportion or the 
 distribution of land and water on the surface of 
 the terraqueous globe, must have produced a 
 change in the events of human history. If Asia 
 had been joined to Europe and Africa only in the 
 arctic and torrid zones, and elsewhere been sepa- 
 rated by a broad sea, without islands to serve as 
 stepping stones, ages might have passed away, and 
 civilization might still have been confined to the 
 region in which it originated. 
 
 If the strata, of which the covering of our globe 
 consists, had remained in their original horizontal 
 position, instead of a surface varying in height 
 from the level of the sea to mountains of 25,000 
 feet, man would have dwelt amidst boundless 
 plains, without those natural barriers and marked 
 
 1 Ukert, Geographie der Griechen und Romer, i. 2. p. 6. 
 
RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 97 
 
 divisions which have given variety both to his race 
 and his history. 
 
 The direction and composition of the mountain 
 chains which, pushed from below by an internal 
 force, now diversify the surface of the earth, has 
 shaped the course of the rivers, on whose banks 
 we find the earliest seats of ancient civilization. 
 Climate, with its manifold influences both on the 
 physical and the intellectual frame of man, and 
 the mode of his subsistence, is determined, not 
 merely by latitude, but by the respective elevation 
 of different countries and their vicinity to the sea, by 
 which temperature is equalized. " How entirely," 
 says Humboldt, " would the temperature of the 
 earth have been changed, and along with it the 
 condition of vegetation, of agriculture and of 
 human society, if the longer axis of the New Con- 
 tinent had had the same direction with that of the 
 old ; if the chain of the Andes had risen up from 
 east to west ; if no tropical continent, like Africa, 
 radiating heat from its surface, had lain to the 
 south of Europe ; if the Mediterranean, which 
 was once connected with th Caspian and the Red 
 Sea, had not existed, and its bottom had been 
 raised to an equal height with the plains of Lorn- 
 p 
 
98 RELATION OF MAN TO THE GLOBE. 
 
 bardy and the Cyrenaica ! " x The variety of the 
 internal structure of the globe, as manifested at 
 its surface by the revolutions of past ages, or dis- 
 covered by man's own research, is a most impor. 
 tant element among the circumstances which have 
 determined his condition and history. He has 
 been enabled to vary his mode of life according to 
 the productions of each soil, and from these differ- 
 ences in his mode of subsistence, other differences 
 in manners, government and religion have flowed. 
 The adaptation of the earth to the residence of 
 man, is nowhere more manifest. In the produc- 
 tions which its strata present, we see provision 
 made for his well-being, even when nothing indi- 
 cated that he was designed to be called into exist- 
 ence. The precious metals, which have become 
 the instrument of his civilization, are deposited in 
 the clefts of one formation ; the coal and ironstone 
 from which his tools, machinery and weapons are 
 fashioned^ lie imbedded in another ; the materials 
 of sculpture and architecture in a third. Even 
 the variety produced in the aspect and vegetable 
 clothing of the earth, by this arrangement of the 
 
 1 Cosmos, p. 312. Germ. Europe, on the same parallel 
 
 The same author points out of latitude, is owing to in- 
 
 how the increase of cold, in creased remoteness of the tem- 
 
 travelling eastward through pering sea, p. 351. 
 
 
 
GRADATION OF ANIMAL LIFE. 99 
 
 strata of which it is composed, has contributed, 
 by its influence on the imagination and taste, to 
 develop the different powers of the mind, and 
 diversify national character. 
 
 We learn from the study of the remains of ex- 
 tinct animals, which the interior of the earth has 
 preserved, that man is the most perfect degree of 
 a long gradation of organized beings, many por- 
 tions of which have perished, and been replaced 
 by others of a higher type, during a succession of 
 ages, whose united or even single duration, science 
 does not venture to guess. The rocks which we 
 reach when we penetrate to the greatest depth, 
 have assumed their actual form under the agency 
 of fire as well as water ; and as fire destroys, while 
 water preserves, the traces of life, we cannot con- 
 clude with certainty that no life, animal or vege- 
 table, preceded the formation of the rocks which 
 immediately rest upon granite. The lowest of 
 the sedimentary rocks are destitute of organic 
 remains, except the tribe offuci. When animals 
 begin to appear, they are of a lower order in 
 creation, and less varied forms, than those with 
 which the earth and the waters are now filled ; 
 and it is generally, though not universally, true, 
 that an ascending scale of life prevails as we ap- 
 f2 
 
100 GRADATION OF ANIMAL LIFE. 
 
 proach the time when the present surface of the 
 globe emerged from the sea. 1 The gradations of 
 this scale are more distinctly seen, from the point 
 at which vertebrated animals make their first ap- 
 pearance in the form of fishes. We know not the 
 circumstances under which these successive races 
 were brought into being, or became extinct. 
 There is no reason to conclude that they were 
 extinguished by sudden and simultaneous cata- 
 strophes, throughout the whole space which their 
 remains occupy, and succeeded by new and instan- 
 taneous creations. The condition in which they 
 are found, renders this probable in particular cir- 
 cumstances, but not as an universal fact or a 
 general law ; since some species disappear, simul- 
 taneously with a great change in the composition 
 of the strata, while others run on, and only gra- 
 dually vanish. Each of the changes in the con- 
 dition of the earth, the waters and the atmosphere, 
 which constitute the physical history of our planet, 
 appears to have been attended with changes more 
 or less extensive in the forms and habits of the 
 living tribes which peopled them. The same re- 
 mark applies to vegetable life, the remains of 
 which, in the latest of the tertiary strata, bear the 
 1 Phillips' Geology, 1, 128. 97. 
 
PERMANENCE OF SPECIES. 101 
 
 nearest resemblance to that which now covers the 
 surface of the globe. As its condition approached 
 to that under which the human race now lives, and 
 chemical, electrical and magnetic forces reached 
 that state of equipoise which makes their agency 
 preservative and not destructive, animal life be- 
 came more varied, more abundant and more ana- 
 logous to that of man. It may be a law of Nature, 
 that the altered condition of the elements shall be 
 slowly followed by changes of organs and structure 
 which at length amount to specific or even generic 
 differences ; or it may have been the order of crea- 
 tive operation, to bring into being new races, when- 
 ever the earth, in its progress from its primaeval to 
 its present state, was prepared generally or partially 
 to receive and preserve them. On either supposition, 
 the correspondence between the world and its inha- 
 bitants, at any given period, is the result of adap- 
 tation; either equally excludes the absurdity of 
 self-production. The question cannot be decided 
 by historical evidence, but this, as far as it goes, 
 is unfavourable to the supposition that Nature 
 gradually exchanges one species for another. We 
 trace nothing like a waste of power in abortive 
 attempts to produce new forms, subsequently 
 abandoned from their unsuitableness. We see in 
 
102 PERMANENCE OF SPECIES. 
 
 the present order of things, no tendency to the 
 production of new species, nor to the extinction 
 of the old except by violent causes. Since the 
 commencement of history, man appears to have 
 been surrounded in his domestic circle, by the 
 same groupe of animals, subdued to his service, 
 and beyond it, by the same hostile inhabitants 
 of the forest and the desert. This law of per- 
 manence, as far as we can judge, belongs also 
 to the vegetable world. We may observe too, as 
 an example of the adaptation of man to the cir- 
 cumstances in which he was placed upon the 
 earth, that it appears to have been inhabited, in 
 a period not long preceding that of his creation, 
 by animals of the same general character as those 
 now found upon it, but much surpassing them in 
 size and power. Unassisted by the resources of 
 art, he would have been little fitted to cope with 
 such animals as the hyaenas of the cave of Kirk- 
 dale, and the other huge carnivora, whose fossil 
 bones remain, or even the stag of the Irish bogs. 
 
 There is a wide difference of opinion among 
 natural philosophers, as to the causes which have 
 produced the past revolutions of the globe. While 
 some regard them as the effect of agencies once 
 infinitely more energetic than they are at present, 
 
103 
 
 to others they seem capable of being explained 
 by means still in operation. That in geological, 
 as distinguished from historical, times, there was 
 nothing like a gradual decline of that internal 
 force by which our continents were raised, is clear, 
 from the circumstance, that both the Alps and 
 the Andes have been elevated through very recent 
 strata. The changes which it has undergone, 
 since man became its inhabitant, appear, however, 
 to be entirely explicable by existing causes. We 
 find no remains of human beings, or the domestic 
 animals, buried among the vegetable and animal 
 productions, which attest the former prevalence of 
 a tropical heat, far northward in the temperate 
 zone. We never find them imbedded in strata 
 which have been elevated since their consolidation 
 beneath the water, nor associated with extinct 
 species, nor even amidst superficial accumula- 
 tions, which the present forces of nature, acting 
 in their present manner, are not sufficient to ex- 
 plain. We can thus assign with probability the 
 geological sera of man's appearance on the earth; 
 he is contemporaneous with its most recent state 5 
 and a portion of a system of organized beings, 
 which, as far as we can see, is permanent in its 
 existing forms. This is the only kind of chro- 
 
104 jera of man's creation. 
 
 nology which can be applied to such a case. The 
 absolute age of the world, reckoned backward in 
 years from some historical epoch, can never be 
 assigned, because its formation has been progres- 
 sive^ and we have not even an approximate mea- 
 surement of the time which each stage has occu- 
 pied. We cannot fix in years the commencement 
 of that stage which we have called the most re- 
 cent, and to which man belongs. We know that 
 an infinite time has not elapsed, since the frag- 
 ments of the mountain began to accumulate them- 
 selves in a slope around its base, the sestuary and 
 the lake to be filled by the deposit of the streams 
 which flow into them, or the cataract to wear away 
 the face of the rock over which it is precipitated ; 
 but in no single case are we sufficiently acquainted 
 with the laws which regulate these changes, to 
 calculate the time required to produce the whole 
 existing effect. It is not probable, indeed, that 
 on every part of the earth's surface, these changes 
 began simultaneously. As far as any estimate 
 can be formed, 1 the time necessary to produce 
 
 1 Cuvier (Theory of the mon chronology of the De- 
 Earth, Eng. Tr. p. 133) and luge; but they are unsatis- 
 De Luc (Geological Travels, factory, from the causes men- 
 passim) have collected many tioned in the text, and might 
 facts of this kind, for the pur- be met by many of an oppo- 
 pose of supporting the com- site tendency. 
 
BIRTH-PLACE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 105 
 
 them would much exceed the utmost limits of our 
 common chronology of the history of man. 
 
 He thus appears to have been placed upon the 
 earth when it had reached such a state, that he 
 was able, by means of his instincts and faculties, to 
 preserve and improve his being. The capacity of 
 self-preservation by means of instinct, belongs 
 to all animated species ; that of self-improvement, 
 to man alone. It is the alte terminus hcerens 
 which for ever separates him from the most highly 
 organized order of inferior animals, and it is this 
 alone which gives him a history. But as we can 
 assign no absolute date to his introduction into 
 the world, nor even decide with confidence whe- 
 ther this took place by simultaneous or succes- 
 sive acts of creative power, so it is impossible to 
 define the time which he occupied in advancing 
 from his primaeval condition to that in which he 
 appears at the commencement of history. 
 
 The same feeling which induced the Roman 
 poet to assign the creation of the human race to 
 spring, 1 leads us to Asia as the cradle in which 
 their infancy was fostered. Its temperate climate 
 and fertile soil were best adapted to their preser- 
 vation and increase, when they were not yet pos- 
 1 Virg. Georg. 2, 335. 
 F 5 
 
106 BIRTH-PLACE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 
 
 sessed of means to extract food from barren soils, 
 or obtain shelter in rigorous seasons. The most 
 authentic traditions, and the ascertained progress 
 of civilization, concur with this presumption. 
 The Western parts of Europe were civilized by 
 Roman conquest ; the Romans only brought into 
 Gaul, Spain and Britain, the arts and knowledge 
 which they had themselves received from Greece ; 
 the Greeks recognized Egypt and Asia as the 
 source whence their own art and science had pro- 
 ceeded. In the Ancient world, at least, there is no 
 authenticated instance of any insulated community 
 attaining to high eminence in arts and knowledge. 
 Egypt can scarcely be considered as an exception 
 to the fact, that all which distinguishes civilized 
 man has been derived from Asia; where Africa 
 approaches Asia, or is known to have had communi- 
 cation with it, there we find civilization — but bar- 
 barism in all other regions : a reasonable pre- 
 sumption that Egypt, though geographically part 
 of Africa, owes nothing to this connection, except 
 an element of her population. The Southern 
 latitudes of Asia are pointed out by a variety of 
 circumstances, — by their genial climate, by their 
 being the native country of the domestic animals, 
 and by their rich variety of spontaneous vegetable 
 
SEAT OF THE EARLIEST CIVILIZATION. 107 
 
 productions, as a suitable theatre for the early 
 history of man. But whether China or India, the 
 valley of the Euphrates and the Tigris, or some 
 intermediate region, as Bactriana, can claim to 
 have been the point whence civilization has dif- 
 fused itself, is a question which we have no means 
 of deciding. Nor can we absolutely pronounce, 
 that no elder people preceded even the eldest of 
 these, from whom they may have received the 
 knowledge of which they have been immemorially 
 in possession. History is silent respecting any 
 such people : and the theories of Bailly, that the 
 traces of their science are to be found in the astro- 
 nomy of the Eastern nations; and of Gosselin, 1 
 that the earliest measures of the earth are the 
 remnants of a system of measurement, prior to 
 the times of historical tradition — have made few 
 converts. About 3000 years before the Christian 
 sera is the utmost limit to which we can carry up 
 the history of civilization, and from this time to 
 our own, the line of its descent is unbroken. 
 
 Man has no history except in the social state, 
 which is so congenial to his nature and so essen- 
 
 1 See his Dissertation pre- from Bailly. Gatterer sup- 
 fixed to the French Transla- posed the Phoenicians to be 
 tion of Strabo. The idea ap- the authors of these ancient 
 pears to have been borrowed measurements. 
 
108 MAN ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL. 
 
 tial to the development of his faculties, that if the 
 human race were not created under such circum- 
 stances as to allow of his entering at once into 
 social relations, he would form them as soon as 
 their numbers had multiplied sufficiently. The 
 steps by which he attained the condition in which 
 we find him, in the earliest history, are unknown, 
 and no speculation will enable us to recover 
 them. We have no ground for assuming that all 
 mankind once lived by the chace, that the pasturage 
 of cattle was their next occupation, and that they 
 reached the agricultural state only after being 
 long detained in the inferior stages of culture. 
 There is no reason to believe that the Troglodytes 
 of the Red Sea, or the Ichthyophagi of the Persian 
 Gulf, or the Nomadic tribes of Arabia or Tartary, 
 represent the state in which the progenitors of the 
 civilized nations in their neighbourhood lived. 
 The mode of subsistence depends on soil and cli- 
 mate ; the pastoral life becomes necessary, where 
 corn cannot be raised, and the nomadic, or that of 
 a wandering shepherd, where pasture is found only 
 at intervals. Nations who follow this mode of life, 
 usually live under the simplest form of polity in 
 which society can hold together; whereas the 
 high cultivation of land implies its secure posses- 
 
THEORIES OF THE PROGRESS OF CIVILIZATION. 109 
 
 sion, and this again the establishment of law. 
 But nothing indicates that man necessarily passes 
 through the pastoral to the agricultural state. A 
 country which, from its marshes and forests, was 
 once unfit for agriculture, may be rendered fit for 
 tillage ; but even in this case it will generally be 
 found that its population has been changed, or 
 that some external impulse has given rise to the 
 improvement. History does not furnish a single 
 example of a nation emerging, by its own efforts, 
 from the condition of hunters, fishers, or shep- 
 herds. Such changes have always been brought 
 about by contact with a more civilized race, and 
 very generally purchased by the loss of national 
 independence, or even personal liberty. 
 
 As man can have no history but in the social 
 state, so we cannot conceive of him as existing 
 without the use of Language. It is not so pro- 
 perly an invention of man, that is, the result of his 
 intellect acting upon the powers and properties of 
 things extraneous to himself, as an instinctive func- 
 tion of the combined organs of thought and utter- 
 ance. The object of this instinct is communica- 
 tion, and its apparent absence in those who have 
 been brought up in an insulated state, is no ob- 
 jection to its being a natural function of man, 
 
110 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 even if there were no reason to suppose that the 
 individuals in question were half idiotic by nature. 
 It is as natural to the human being to speak arti- 
 culately^ as to the brutes to communicate by in- 
 articulate sounds. The difficulty which has been 
 felt in conceiving how language should have 
 originated, has been caused by considering it as 
 something purely arbitrary and conventional ; and 
 as such a conventional system could scarcely be 
 established without the use of language, it seemed 
 that the existence of the thing to be explained 
 was involved in the explanation of its origin. 
 But that it is not arbitrary in its forms, is 
 proved by the circumstance, which Adelung has 
 noticed, that the roots of any language will be 
 found not to exceed a few hundreds, while the 
 possible combinations of vocal sound, even exclud- 
 ing those which are too harsh for pronunciation, 
 amount to a number hardly to be expressed by 
 figures. 1 The etymology and grammar of lan- 
 guage clearly show, that their growth and forma- 
 
 ^MithridateSjEinl.p.xvi.xv. mont 330 — 350 in the Chi- 
 " Fulda found in the German nese." On the other hand, 
 from 300 — 400 roots; Court "Leibnitz, in his Ars Cowhi- 
 de Gebelin, not 400 in the natoria, makes the combina- 
 French ; Fourmont, only 300 tions of 24 letters exceed half 
 in the Greek, with all its co- a quadrillion." 
 piousness; Bayer and Four- 
 
ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. Ill 
 
 tion from these simple elements has not been an 
 arbitrary process, but has been carried on with a 
 purpose of making vocal sound a more exact repre- 
 sentative of the operations and affections of the 
 mind. It is true, that language, as we now see it 
 propagated, appears to be learnt by passive imita- 
 tion. Yet the child, following some internal im- 
 pulse of his own, is for ever showing a disposition 
 to go beyond the barriers which grammar and usage 
 have set up, to coin new words, or follow out new 
 analogies. If, in the absence of all recorded ex- 
 ample of the manner in which language has been 
 formed, we may venture to speculate on its pro- 
 gress, we should seek its origin in the imitation of 
 the sounds of external nature. Words framed in 
 evident imitation of these sounds, are found in all 
 languages, the most polished, as well as the most 
 rude. The range of this onomatopoeia in any lan- 
 guage bears, indeed, a very small proportion to 
 the whole number of its roots : but when once the 
 difficulty of mutual understanding had been got 
 over, by the association of this sound, with the 
 natural object or phenomenon which the sound 
 characterized, it would be easy to derive from 
 these a multitude of analogical meanings, sounds 
 of peculiar quality being connected, by a natural 
 
112 ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE. 
 
 affinity, with mental states and emotions. The 
 further we recede from audible resemblances be- 
 tween the word and the thing signified, the more 
 difficult we find it to fix, in what the relation be- 
 tween word and thought consists. Even when we 
 feel its existence most strongly, we are at a loss to 
 define it. Yet were there not some such natural 
 connection, which, though obscurely felt on both 
 sides, aided the speaker to select the word which 
 he makes the symbol of his thought, and the 
 hearer to appreciate its significance, there could 
 have been no advance towards mutual understand- 
 ing among men. The establishment of language 
 would be greatly aided by the plasticity of the 
 human countenance, which is furnished with 
 muscles not found in the irrational animals, whose 
 sole use is to express the feelings ; and by the range 
 of imitative gesture supplied by the hands. 1 
 
 Speech is one of the most unchangeable habits 
 of mankind, if we regard the elements and great 
 analogies of language ; and a common speech one 
 of the closest bonds of the social union. Finding, 
 therefore, that the migrations and intermixture of 
 nations, where they can be historically traced, 
 
 1 Sir C.Bell, Anatomy of Expression, Essay v. p. 121. 
 
AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 113 
 
 leave proofs of their occurrence in similarity of 
 language, we are entitled to infer that where the 
 same similarity exists, without any historical solu- 
 tion, migration and intermixture have been the 
 cause. The certainty of this conclusion will not 
 be weakened by what has been said of the natural 
 connection between sounds and the objects or 
 ideas which they express, except where it is pushed 
 so far, as to make the coincidence of a few words 
 in two different languages, a ground for maintain- 
 ing the original identity or affinity of nations. 
 This principle, which, followed out under the con- 
 trol of the rules of inductive philosophy, has fur- 
 nished modern inquirers with so many curious 
 conclusions respecting the early connection of 
 nations, widely separated by their present locality, 
 no doubt led men also, in very remote times, to 
 speculate on the affinity of those tribes whose 
 speech they had the means of observing and com- 
 paring. Such speculations must necessarily be 
 crude, because the philosophical study of the 
 analogies of language was unknown in the ancient 
 world, even in the period of its highest intellectual 
 culture, and the means of acquiring an accurate 
 knowledge of a foreign tongue were very scanty. 
 Where we find a nation carrying up the line of its 
 
114 AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 
 
 own descent to the commencement of the human 
 race, we find also that it assumes, in its specula- 
 tions and etymologies, the high or primseval anti- 
 quity of its own language. According to the 
 popular conceptions of the Jews, the primitive 
 language of mankind was precisely the same as 
 that in which their earliest literature was composed. 
 Even in the ante-diluvian history, all the etymolo- 
 gies are purely Hebrew. To one who inquires into 
 the causes of the visible affinity of language among 
 nations, with an accurate knowledge of their struc- 
 ture, and of the various circumstances of an eth- 
 nographical kind, which must be considered in 
 connection with language, the problem appears 
 very complex, and its historical solution doubtful, 
 if not impossible. Such difficulties would not 
 embarrass those whose attention was caught in 
 early times by the obvious fact of a similarity of 
 speech; and as the problem was simple, genea- 
 logical descent offered a simple solution of it. The 
 oldest and most remarkable document of this kind, 
 is that contained in the tenth chapter of the Book 
 of Genesis. If it be regarded as exhibiting the 
 state of knowledge and opinion among the people 
 with whom it originated, respecting the relation- 
 ship of the tribes of men, whose languages were 
 
AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 115 
 
 known to them, it will be found to contain mate- 
 rials for history of the highest value. That know- 
 ledge, however, was certainly imperfect in extent, 
 if not in quality, and the opinions founded upon 
 it, must, therefore, be open to correction from 
 other sources. It proceeds throughout, upon the 
 supposition, that personal descent has been the 
 origin of national affinity; and thus not only names 
 evidently plural, as Mizraim, Ludim, Philistim, 
 and collective names, as Cush and Elisha, appear 
 as individuals, parents of nations, in its tables of 
 descent, but even names of cities, as Tarshish and 
 Sidon. As it originated among a people who 
 themselves belonged to the family which claimed 
 the patriarch Shem for their progenitor, it points 
 out the affinity which united its different branches, 
 the Assyrians, 1 Syrians, Hebrews and Arabians, 
 an affinity attested, by independent evidence, and 
 the close resemblance of their languages, most of 
 them existing at the present hour. But we are 
 not to expect the same accuracy in regard to 
 nations which lay beyond the sphere of their ob- 
 servation, or to find the traces of one original 
 
 1 Gesenius (Heb. Spr. 62) Arabian family, but, as it ap- 
 denies that the Assyrian Ian- pears, on insufficient grounds, 
 guage belonged to the Syro- 
 
116 AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 
 
 language, among the various tribes to whom Ham 
 and Japheth are assigned as progenitors. In 
 regard to them we must have recourse to other 
 evidence, chiefly brought to light by the researches 
 of the last half century. By means of these it 
 has been shown, that a similarity both in roots and 
 in structure, too close and too extensive to be the 
 result of accident, has extended from the Penin- 
 sula of India, through Bactriana and Persia, 
 Greece and Italy, and the furthest limits of the 
 Celtic, Gothic and Slavonic tribes in Europe. 
 Such a similarity, reasoning from known pheno- 
 mena, we can only attribute to affinity or inter- 
 mixture of the nations by whom these languages 
 were spoken. Yet in history there is no record, 
 not even a tradition, of any events by which such 
 intermixture can be explained ; we cannot even 
 frame a theory to account for it, without supposing 
 a state of things entirely different from that con- 
 dition of the world, which history at its opening 
 discloses to us. Where the affinity is most evi- 
 dent, we cannot say with certainty which is the 
 elder, which the parent, and which the child. The 
 study of comparative philology is, indeed, still in 
 its infancy, and its progress has been embarrassed, 
 in this country at least, by the tacit or express 
 
AFFINITY OF LANGUAGES. 117 
 
 assumption, that the existence of nations speaking 
 languages so different as to be mutually unintel- 
 ligible, was separated by the interval of only a few 
 generations from the time when the whole human 
 race had one uniform speech. From this young 
 but vigorous science, much clearer insight into the 
 affinities and filiations of mankind may be expect- 
 ed ; but the times in which they were established 
 will still remain essentially ante-historic. The 
 wide-spread family of languages, which has been 
 called Indo-European, differs in most of its roots, 
 still more in its etymological principles and gram- 
 matical forms, from the Semitic or Syro -Arabian 
 family. Of the people supposed to be descended 
 from Ham, only one, the Egyptian, has handed 
 down to us any memorials of its ancient language ; 
 but these are sufficient to show that it differed 
 essentially from both the foregoing. The mono- 
 syllabic languages of Eastern Asia, those of the 
 nomadic nations in its Northern and Central re- 
 gions, of the interior of Africa, the islands of the 
 Indian Seas and the Pacific, and of the New 
 World, do not come within our view in treating of 
 primaeval history. They are so manifold and vari- 
 ous, that it is impossible to assign to them a com- 
 mon origin in a single locality, without ascending to 
 
118 INVENTION OF WRITTEN CHARACTERS. 
 
 an antiquity far exceeding all authentic chrono- 
 logy. A period so limited as that which is ordi- 
 narily supposed is quite inadequate to explain the 
 difference which has existed, from the very com- 
 mencement of history, between the Goptic and 
 Syro- Arabian languages, or even the Hebrew and 
 the Syriac. 1 To the historian, the great nations 
 of antiquity are autochthones ; we cannot say 
 whence or at what time the Egyptians came into 
 Egypt, or the Hindus into India; or even the 
 Pelasgi and Hellenes into Greece. 
 
 We have said that speech is rather a function 
 than an invention of man, but the employment of 
 a written symbol to record and communicate the 
 spoken word is properly an invention, and the 
 most important of all those by which civilization 
 has been advanced. All that lies before the time 
 of its introduction has been irretrievably lost to 
 history, and much no doubt that happened after 
 that event, and before its application to the pur- 
 pose of preserving history. Its use in some form 
 or other is immemorial in Egypt and Asia, but 
 we cannot even conjecture the date of its inven- 
 tion 5 or the time and manner of its diffusion. 
 What we find in ancient authors on these subjects 
 1 Gen. 31, 47. 
 
INVENTION OF WRITTEN CHARACTERS. 119 
 
 are evidently mythic fictions of a much later age. 
 The Egyptians referred it to a Thoth, the Jews to 
 Seth, or his children/ the Greeks to Hermes. 
 But Thout in Coptic, 2 IW in Hebrew, 'Ep/mrjg 3 in 
 Greek, are all names for a pillar or post ; and the 
 real fact hidden under these several fables, is that 
 a pillar was the earliest monument on which the 
 art of writing was employed, or at least, as being 
 the most durable, passed for the most ancient. We 
 are carried back, by retracing the history of the 
 diffusion of the art, to the same region in which 
 we have already found the earliest marks of civili- 
 zation, but we cannot fix on any precise spot to 
 which its origin may be referred. The Phoenician 
 alphabet has been the parent of the Greek and 
 Roman, and it is not improbable that it has itself 
 originated from the phonetic alphabet of the 
 Egyptians, which is known to have been in use 
 at the building of the pyramids. This alphabet 
 represented fifteen sounds, R and L not being dis- 
 tinguished. The appropriation of a separate cha- 
 racter for one of these would give sixteen, the 
 original number of the Greek alphabet. 4 
 
 1 Joseph. Ant. i. 2, 3. epfia and kpfxis. II. a', 486. Od. 
 
 2 Peyron, Lexicon Linguae rj', 278. 
 
 Copticae s. voc. Gen. 19, 26. 4 Plut. Plat. Quaest. x. 1. p. 
 
 in the Coptic version. 1009. F. Pliny, N. H. 7, 56. 
 
 * This is the Homeric use of 
 
120 ALPHABETS OF VARIOUS ORIGIN. 
 
 This phonetic use of hieroglyphic characters 
 would lead us to regard picture-writing as the re- 
 mote source of the alphabet; but in the cunei- 
 form character of the Persepolitan inscriptions we 
 have an example of an alphabet which has no 
 connection with picture-writing, and has evidently 
 been formed by combinations of a single charac- 
 ter. The antiquity of the inscriptions existing at 
 Persepolis, and other places within the dominions 
 of the Achsemenidse, is not very great ; but the 
 bricks which compose the ruined structures of 
 Babylon bear impressions of a character very 
 closely allied, though not identical. The Devana- 
 gari, the character in which the Sanscrit Litera- 
 ture is written, bears no resemblance to any of 
 the alphabets of Western Asia: and that of 
 China, and the countries in which monosyllabic 
 languages prevail, is not alphabetical. It denotes 
 objects and ideas by immediate association with 
 the visible sign appropriated to them, not by 
 analysis of the sounds of language. We have thus, 
 in four great centres of ancient civilization, four 
 separate modes of denoting and communicating 
 thought, so dissimilar to each other, as to lead to 
 the conclusion, that they are separate inventions. 
 
 It has been a speculation, that mankind had 
 
EARLIEST SEATS OF CIVILIZATION. 121 
 
 their first abode on mountains, or at least in 
 elevated regions, because these were first left dry 
 by the retreating waters of the Deluge, or first 
 raised by the expansive central force ; or because 
 they afforded security during the prevalence of 
 lawless violence. Yet it is certain that the earliest 
 known seats of civilization in the East were the 
 rich alluvial soil, which forms the banks of mighty 
 rivers. These, under every climate, invite the 
 early settlements of men, by their various conve- 
 niences ; but in those latitudes in which history 
 begins, a plain without a river is a desert, the 
 sky either furnishing, as in Egypt, no moisture by 
 which exhalation can be replaced, or only at such 
 long intervals that a drought would regularly inter- 
 vene between the rainy seasons. Such countries, 
 being in some measure insulated by the chains of 
 hills which bound them, favour the tranquil diffu- 
 sion of population, and the commencement of the 
 social union. The nucleus, at least, of the great 
 kingdoms which we find in existence when history 
 begins, appears to have been formed of tribes 
 speaking the same language ; and without this 
 bond, no voluntary coalition would probably have 
 taken place. In the valley of the Nile, below 
 Syene, and on the banks of the Mesopotamian 
 
 G 
 
122 ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT. 
 
 rivers, only one language, with dialectic differences, 
 prevailed. We know less of India, but if it be 
 true that the Sanskrit, though now obsolete, runs 
 through all the native idioms of the Peninsula, we 
 may conclude that it was once the national lan- 
 guage. Not only is there no sympathy, tending 
 to union, between those who speak different lan- 
 guages — there is absolute repugnance; they are 
 barbarians to each other. With a community of 
 language, similarity of institutions and religion is 
 naturally combined, and the belief of a common 
 origin binds all together, by a tie as strict and 
 sacred as that of family. Even the physical re- 
 semblances which generally prevail among those 
 whose speech is the same, dispose to union, and a 
 marked difference is a cause of repulsion. 
 
 Government originates in the instinct of man 
 for society : none of its purposes can be attained 
 without the control of some superior. He not only 
 submits, from necessity, to force greater than his 
 own, but from a natural sentiment to greater wis- 
 dom and superior virtue. It is, indeed, as much from 
 sentiment as from necessity, that he is so generally 
 disposed to yield pre-eminence to those whom 
 nature has marked by their greater strength and 
 loftier stature ; since the difference in brute force, 
 
ABSOLUTE MONARCHY. 123 
 
 which this conformation gives, might easily be 
 compensated by the combination of the weaker. 
 Submission to authority being, therefore, an indis- 
 pensable condition of society, man falls into it, 
 without any formal compact, stipulating protec- 
 tion on one side, and obedience on the other. "We 
 find in the earliest historic times, mankind not only 
 obeying the patriarchal authority of age and wis- 
 dom, but living under monarchies, and even here- 
 ditary monarchies, in which the law of succession 
 places absolute power in the hands of feeble- 
 ness and folly. Absurd as such a' rule may 
 appear, when tried by the standard of utility, there 
 is no ground for believing that it was always im- 
 posed on an unwilling people, by foreign conquest 
 or military usurpation. Nor is its origin to be 
 sought in the hereditary transmission of wealth 
 and its attendant power, nor in the artifices of 
 parental affection, or ambition desirous to pro- 
 long its authority, after death, in the line of its 
 descendants. It is sentiment, not a calculation of 
 benefit, which made, and still makes, the nations 
 of the East, like those of Russia, glory in the 
 power of their sovereign, though it involves their 
 own servitude, and sacrifice life and substance for 
 his gratification. The fiction of a divine nature 
 g2 
 
124 HEREDITARY MONARCHY. 
 
 or descent may increase this sentiment, but is not 
 its primary source. It is because their king is 
 glorious and venerable in their eyes, that they 
 readily lend themselves to this belief; the fiction 
 is but the expression of a deep and pervading feel- 
 ing. The same sentiment is transferred, by a 
 natural association, from the parent to the child, 
 who is more readily acknowledged as chief than 
 the son of a stranger. The impulse of feeling 
 may be controlled by considerations of utility, 
 interest may be stronger than gratitude, state 
 necessity may demand the throne for an abler or 
 an older man; and hereditary right, so strongly 
 guarded by law and opinion as to resist all these 
 considerations, implies an artificial state of society. 
 But in its origin it is congenial to human nature, 
 and the same sentiment operates in common life, 
 to secure to the child what the father has pos- 
 sessed. The oriental mind has always been more 
 imaginative than that of the western nations; 
 political institutions in the East have been little 
 influenced by reasonings on the purpose of go- 
 vernment, and the feeling of reverence and sub- 
 mission towards the monarch has there exhibited 
 an intensity and depth, which, with us, is at most 
 occasional. Yet, considerations of utility may 
 
HEREDITARY ARISTOCRACY. 125 
 
 have enforced and perpetuated what natural senti- 
 ment had begun. One of the first wants of society 
 is a strong executive for the maintenance of order. 
 Monarchy best provides for this, and the tyranny 
 into which it easily degenerates is acquiesced in, 
 for the sake of a great and permanent good. 
 
 Aristocracy, as a 'transmitted distinction, owes, 
 like monarchy, its influence over mankind, more to 
 sentiment than to the material superiority, confer- 
 red by wealth, or strength, or military skill. It may 
 be reasonably presumed to have originated in excel- 
 lence of some kind ; but its roots everywhere reach 
 beyond the commencement of history. We may 
 trace our own aristocracy, from its actual founda- 
 tion in custom and law, to the appropriation of 
 land by victorious chieftains, in the Conquest of 
 England, or the overthrow of the Western Em- 
 pire, but an aristocracy of descent already existed 
 in Germany, 1 distinct from military rank, when 
 fixed property in land, and the use of the precious 
 metals, were unknown. 
 
 Law has its origin in the sentiments and sym- 
 pathies of mankind ; the magistrate, whatever be 
 his name, does not give to them their notions of 
 
 1 Tac. Mor. Germ. 7. Reges sumunt. Comp. 5. 26. 
 ex nobilitate, duces ex virtute 
 
126 ORIGIN OF LAW. 
 
 justice and right, but fulfils, or at most completes 
 and defines, the conception, which nature has im- 
 planted in their breasts, and upholds the general 
 and lasting conviction of the community, against 
 the passion or interest of the individual. A state 
 in which no feeling of social duty, no sense of the 
 rights of a fellow-man, existed, is as much a fiction 
 as the golden age, in which there was no selfish- 
 ness and no crime. But this sympathy, which all 
 legislation, whether human or divine, presupposes, 
 and without which no code, whether enforced by 
 temporal or eternal sanctions, would be efficacious, 
 is unfolded by slow degrees, and a right not sup- 
 ported by might, would be imperfectly acknow- 
 ledged, and violated at every impulse. Among 
 the nations who were earliest in civilization, and 
 consequently in history, three circumstances prin- 
 cipally distinguish the social relations from our 
 own — the relative condition of man and woman, of 
 parent and child, of master and slave. One prin- 
 ciple pervades them all, that sacrifice of the hap- 
 piness of the weaker to the stronger, which man 
 is always prone to exact, when his selfishness is 
 not controlled by his own affections, or by the 
 more enlightened views and more humane feeling 
 of the community to which he belongs. 
 
CONJUGAL RELATION. 127 
 
 This knowledge and feeling, however, will not 
 be far in advance of that of the individual, and 
 domestic relations are of too refined and subtle 
 a nature to admit of much control by positive law. 
 They usually remain what natural sentiment has 
 made them. The indirect control of an enlight- 
 ened public opinion, which is even more efficacious 
 than law, in checking the influence of selfishness 
 and passion in domestic life, and procuring respect 
 to the rights of the weaker, could scarcely exist in 
 early times, when the means of the communica- 
 tion of opinion were so limited. 
 
 1. Marriage is an institution coeval with civili- 
 zation, and it is only in mythology that we find 
 an origin assigned to it. 1 The permanent union 
 of those between whom the conjugal relation has 
 existed, and been followed by the birth of children, 
 is the result of natural sentiment, and its import- 
 ance to the order of society is so obvious, that it 
 has early received the sanction of law. But it re- 
 quires a much higher refinement of this natural 
 sentiment to limit this union to one. In the 
 East, where women grow old at an earlier age than 
 in our climate, monogamy meets with a strong 
 obstruction in the passions of the male sex, and 
 1 Goguet, i. p. 22. 
 
128 
 
 PARENTAL RELATION. 
 
 has never established itself, except where religion 
 has condemned polygamy, or poverty has made 
 the expensive luxury of the harem unattainable. 1 
 
 2. Nature herself gives into the hands of the 
 parent a power more despotic than she grants in 
 any other relation. To the difference of physical 
 strength is added that of a matured and an infant 
 understanding ; life, subsistence, health, the com- 
 munication of knowledge — all depend on the 
 pleasure of the father, who, as master in the con- 
 jugal relation, disposes of the fate of the common 
 offspring. But this terrible power is tempered by 
 a force of sympathy, which no other relation ex- 
 hibits, to guard against its abuse ; and many 
 strong feelings intervene, to shield the helpless- 
 ness of the child. Pride, as well as affection, inte- 
 rests the father in behalf of his son ; it is through 
 him that he hopes to live in a future generation ; 
 it is to his love that he must trust for that care 
 which his declining years will demand. Still the 
 general characteristic of the relation between the 
 parent and the child in early times, as far as his- 
 tory has preserved any account of it, is, that the 
 
 1 The counterpart of poly- men, does not appear to have 
 
 gamy, what has been called prevailed among the nations 
 
 polyandria, the possession of of the East in early times, 
 the same woman by many 
 
SLAVERY. 129 
 
 parent enjoyed a degree of irresponsible authority, 
 much greater than modern legislation allows. 
 The humanity of the laws of Egypt forbade the 
 exposure of infants; in the other great mo- 
 narchies even this restriction does not appear 
 to have been placed upon the patria potestas. 
 Where the direct power of government is the 
 least, the greatest rigour and hardness prevails in 
 the domestic relations ; they supply the place of 
 legal authority, in keeping society together, and 
 it is only a government both vigilant and strong 
 that could undertake their regulation. 
 
 3. The abolition of slavery is one of the last 
 effects of the growth of a more comprehensive 
 sympathy, in purifying the social relations, from 
 institutions founded on the abuse of strength. In 
 the earliest ages it was universal, and no senti- 
 ment forbade the application of the same right of 
 possession to a fellow-creature and a brute. It 
 may often have originated in voluntary compact, 
 under the influence of want, more frequently in 
 war, kidnapping, or a judicial sentence for debt or 
 crime. The impossibility of regulating by law 
 such a relation as that of master and slave, is a 
 fatal objection to its existence, even where law is 
 most humane in its spirit, and vigorous in its 
 g5 
 
130 INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 
 
 execution ; and in the absence of legal protection, 
 that which the slave obtains from natural sym- 
 pathy is small, especially if he be a foreigner. 
 Yet where the simplicity of manners allowed the 
 master and the slave to share the same domestic 
 pleasures and occupations, reciprocal affection 
 sprang up ; among the Jews at least, the condition 
 of the hireling, who had no fixed service or abode, 
 was regarded as more miserable than servitude. 
 We find that the Egyptians maintained an ho- 
 nourable pre-eminence among the monarchies 
 of early civilization, in regard to the protection 
 of slaves, and the Mosaic code contained many 
 provisions for alleviating their lot. 
 
 Another circumstance which strongly character- 
 izes the early monarchies of the East, is the division 
 of the population into castes, or hereditary orders 
 and professions, the son being limited to the occu- 
 pation which his father had pursued. The extent 
 to which this has been carried varies ; in Media 
 and Persia, and in Judaea, only the sacerdotal body 
 appear to have formed a caste ; in India and Egypt, 
 the priests and warriors were certainly distinct from 
 the other orders of the community, who were them- 
 selves sub-divided into two or more hereditary 
 classes, though we know not exactly on what 
 
INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 131 
 
 principle. Nothing in the known history of 
 these countries, or of Attica or Iberia, where a 
 fourfold division prevailed, 1 indicates that this 
 distinction was connected with an original differ- 
 ence of race, or that it was produced by conquest, 
 or established by positive legislation, or arranged 
 by mutual compact. The circumstance that in 
 some countries it extended only to the priests, 
 who could not by force have obtained for them- 
 selves exclusive privileges, points to some natural 
 cause, operating in all ancient communities, but 
 with variable force. Whoever possesses any know- 
 ledge or skill which is denied to others, is raised 
 by it to superior estimation, and even substantial 
 power. This advantage he naturally seeks to per- 
 petuate, like any other, in the line of his own 
 descent, admits his children to the participation 
 of his secret, but carefully excludes the stranger. 
 The priest, who is believed to be alone in posses- 
 sion of the all-important knowledge, how the 
 favour of the gods is to be gained, and their wrath 
 averted, easily transmits his monopoly to another 
 generation; and in proportion as the system of 
 theology becomes more complex and mysterious, 
 or the ritual more elaborate, the difficulty of an 
 1 Herod. 5, 66. Strabo. B. 8. p. 383. 
 
132 INSTITUTION OF CASTES. 
 
 attempt to break through it is increased. The 
 warrior, who trains his children to the use of arms, 
 leaves them the means of maintaining themselves 
 and their descendants, in a station only second to 
 that of the priest. When the processes of art are 
 not laid open in writing to the public, but com- 
 municated by personal instruction, and a long 
 course of practice under the teacher's eye, it is 
 easy for the father to secure it as a craft and mys- 
 tery to his son. This tendency throughout society, 
 to the establishment of hereditary succession, 
 manifests itself at the present day ; but being 
 checked by the general diffusion of knowledge, 
 the eagerness of competition, and the freedom of 
 political institutions, it can never advance to the 
 establishment of a caste. In the East, it was early 
 adopted, more or less extensively, as a fundamental 
 law of society ; the higher castes guarded the pu- 
 rity of their blood, by refusing intermarriage with 
 the lower, and resorted to mythic fiction, to give 
 antiquity and divine sanction to their monopoly. 
 In monarchies, the strict confinement of every 
 man to the rank and occupation which his birth 
 has assigned him, is a security against the ambi- 
 tion which might aspire to the throne itself, and 
 keeps society in that passive state, which is most 
 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 133 
 
 safe and acceptable to those who enjoy exclusive 
 privileges. In the earlier stages of civilization, 
 the existence of castes may prevent the loss of 
 knowledge or skill once acquired, as it certainly 
 tends to retard the diffusion of that which has 
 been gained. We might have been tempted to 
 attribute chiefly to it the stability of Eastern 
 governments, and the absence of progressive im- 
 provement, did not the example of China, in 
 which castes are unknown, prove that this is at 
 least not the only cause from which monotony 
 and uniformity may spring. 
 
 The forms of religious belief which we find pre- 
 vailing among the earliest civilized nations of anti- 
 quity, present a similarity which must have been 
 caused either by a common historical origin, or 
 common principles in human nature. Whatever 
 knowledge of a pure and spiritual theism may have 
 been supernaturally communicated to men in pri- 
 maeval times, was lost, except in the family of 
 Abraham, in its Hebrew and Arabian branches, 
 before history begins. We have, therefore, to re- 
 gard the religion of the Egyptians or Babylonians, 
 as the result of their own feeling and speculation 
 like their opinions on natural or moral philosophy. 
 The belief in an unseen Power appears to begin 
 
134 RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 
 
 rather in feeling than in speculation . Man is con- 
 scious of a double nature within himself; he feels 
 that besides the body which he can touch, whose 
 parts he can distinguish and assign to their several 
 uses, there is something whose nature and seat he 
 cannot define, whose substance he cannot grasp, 
 at once interfused with the body and distinct from 
 it, wielding its powers and guiding them by intel- 
 ligence and a moral purpose. This internal feeling 
 leads him to believe that the World beyond him- 
 self is animated by a similar presiding Intelligence, 
 and he explains its phenomena by the agency of 
 a spiritual Essence which inhabits and informs it. 
 To this conception of a god, he transfers his own 
 moral feelings, and Providence is only a copy of 
 the votary's internal being. So far he is a Mono- 
 theist. But his speculation takes also a more ob- 
 jective form; he sees in nature a variety of objects 
 and energies, independent and even opposite in 
 their qualities and operations, and creates an intel- 
 ligent power, by which he supposes each of them 
 to be animated. The former mode of conceiving 
 of god, appears to lie nearer to the human mind ; 
 but which has actually been first, in order of time, 
 is a question very difficult to be decided on histo- 
 rical testimony. Nations have been found, at a 
 
RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 135 
 
 very low point in the scale of civilization, having 
 no communication with tribes of more cultivated 
 understanding, no source of supernatural know- 
 ledge, who have conceived of the Supreme Being 
 as one great Spirit. Even where the most com- 
 plex system of polytheism had been established, 
 in the popular belief and worship, there seems to 
 have co- existed with it, not only in the philoso- 
 phical, but also in the vulgar mind, a .recognition 
 indicated by the forms of speech, 1 of one supreme 
 controlling Power. Indeed, a complicated and well- 
 defined system of mythology must be the work of 
 a nation that has made no mean progress in cul- 
 ture. Poetry and art must lend their aid to em- 
 body and discriminate the vague conceptions with 
 which polytheism begins. The Pelasgi worshipped 
 the gods by a general appellation; the Hellenic 
 poets of the school of Homer and Hesiod first 
 gave them a history and distinguishing attributes, 2 
 and inspired the artist with sublime models. 
 Egypt, India, Babylonia and Phoenicia, are equally 
 conspicuous for high civilization and for the extent 
 of their Pantheon. In the systematized form in 
 
 1 Cum jurant, et cum op- sed Deum nominant. Lactant. 
 tant et cum gratias agrent, Div. Inst. 2, 1. 
 non Jovem aut deos multos 2 Herod. 2, 53. 
 
136 CONTEMPLATIVE RELIGION. 
 
 which mythology has reached us, we see every- 
 where the endeavour to combine the notion of 
 unity with that of multitude, by representing the 
 many gods as manifestations or offspring of one, 
 and by their subordination to preserve the har- 
 mony of the whole. 
 
 The belief in a spiritual divinity, naturally pro- 
 duces the endeavour, by intense contemplation, to 
 arrive at a more intimate union with God and 
 more distinct conception of his being. Religion 
 has assumed this form in India from the earliest 
 recorded times ; how far it prevailed in the other 
 countries of the East we know not, for a contem- 
 plative religion does not, like a ritual, leave traces 
 of itself in the works of art. Egypt was, in the 
 Christian age, the parent of the eremitic and mo- 
 nastic life ; and as religious history is only the 
 development of certain principles inherent in man, 
 modified by special circumstances and national cha- 
 racter, it is probable that such a form of religion 
 co-existed with the public and ceremonial in earlier 
 times. A contemplative religion naturally be- 
 comes ascetic ; the body is considered as an anta- 
 gonist to the mind, impeding its operations and 
 preventing its ascent to the Deity, and therefore 
 to be mortified and reduced. The self-inflicted 
 
ORGIASTIC RELIGION. 137 
 
 tortures of the ascetic belong to another feeling ; 
 the same consciousness of guilt and the endeavour 
 to conciliate God and avert his wrath, from which 
 expiatory sacrifice had its origin. 
 
 We may reasonably presume the high antiquity 
 in the East, of the orgy, another manifestation of 
 religious feeling. We see even in modern times, 
 that the strong internal agitation which accom- 
 panies it, shows itself externally in passionate 
 cries, violent gestures and rapid movement. Sti- 
 mulated by sympathy, and the accompaniments of 
 a wild music and artificial light, it assumed the 
 character of a frenzy. The prevalence of dancing, 
 as a part of religious ceremonies, appears to be the 
 effect of the same tendency in this feeling to find 
 a vent and relief in movement, tempered and re- 
 gulated by that sense of harmony and rhythm, 
 which is one of the ultimate facts of the constitu- 
 tion of man. 
 
 Man naturally seeks to fill the immense void 
 between himself and God, by peopling it with a 
 race of intermediate beings, of whom the mind 
 more easily conceives. Under various names, such 
 a class of derived and inferior divinities appears in 
 all the ancient theologies. The doctrine of ema- 
 nations and incarnations appears to have had the 
 
138 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 
 
 same source, the desire to invest a spiritual nature 
 with some material form, which should render it 
 more apprehensible by human faculties. Philo- 
 sophy and popular religion have directly opposite 
 tendencies. While philosophy, by reducing all 
 the operations of nature under demonstrated laws, 
 not only dispenses with intermediate supernatural 
 agency, but even removes the Supreme cause to a 
 dim and almost infinite distance, popular religion 
 seeks to draw him down from the heaven of hea- 
 vens, to nearer communion with his creatures and 
 more immediate superintendence of their affairs. 
 To this extent the religionist and the philosopher 
 are necessarily antagonists ; but each holds a por- 
 tion of the truth, and it is only intolerance, on the 
 one side or the other, that makes them enemies. 
 
 The theology of the Gentiles was long supposed 
 to have originated in the deification of departed 
 human spirits. The passions, actions and outward 
 form of humanity, had been attributed to their 
 gods so entirely by the Greeks and Romans, that 
 it was almost an unavoidable inference, that they 
 had once been human beings, raised to the rank of 
 divinity by the gratitude of mankind. It suited 
 the views of those who wished to bring the popular 
 theology into contempt, so to consider the gods, 
 
ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 139 
 
 and Euhemerus, an Epicurean philosopher, feigned 
 himself to have discovered, in a voyage to Panchaia, 
 a record of their births and actions. 1 The Chris- 
 tian writers availed themselves of this supposed 
 origin, to expose the absurdity of polytheism; 
 those who cultivated ancient history, after the re- 
 vival of letters, adopted it very generally, and 
 Osiris, Bacchus, Belus and Jupiter appear in their 
 histories as sovereigns of their respective coun- 
 tries. 2 This place they could not hold, when anti- 
 quity was studied in a more free and comprehen- 
 sive spirit, for it was found that no art could give 
 historical consistency and chronological order to 
 their supposed actions, even when the number of 
 those who had borne the same name was multi- 
 plied with the most arbitrary license. 3 The plau- 
 sibility which this explanation wore, when applied 
 to Greek or Roman mythology, disappeared when 
 it was tried on those of other countries, whose gods 
 retained more of their primitive character. No 
 greater permanence has attended the opinion that 
 
 1 Diod. Sic. Fr. lib. 6. 2, 3 Nullo prope sasculo de- 
 632. ed. Wessel. fuit suus Jupiter usque ad 
 
 2 Sir Isaac Newton's Chro- tempora belli Trojani. Voss. 
 nology of Ancient Kingdoms Idol. 1, 14. p. 58. He reckons 
 is entirely built on the basis of two if not three Argive Ju- 
 Euhemerism, of the most ex- piters, two Cretan, &c. 
 treme kind. 
 
140 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 
 
 the Gentile Deities were the fallen angels, who 
 thus revenged themselves on the true God, by 
 usurping his honour; 1 or the personages of Scrip- 
 ture history, Adam and the ante-diluvian Patri- 
 archs, Noah and his sons, Abraham and his de- 
 scendants. 2 It is indeed evident that the belief 
 in gods cannot have begun with the deification of 
 men, since the very act implies the previous con- 
 ception of a god. Much of what we call the 
 heroic worship of the Greeks, appears to have 
 been only a worship of the great gods, under 
 forgotten names; but when they really paid divine 
 honours to the illustrious dead, they were quite 
 aware of the nature of their worship, and distin- 
 guished it, both in name and form, from that which 
 they paid to the gods. 3 The deification of de- 
 ceased rulers was a piece of flattery understood 
 by all, and as little connected with serious belief, 
 as the attribution of the title god, to a living king 
 of Syria or Egypt. 
 
 1 It happily survived to the His system appears to have 
 time of Milton, and gave occa- still some followers in Eng- 
 sion to the splendid passage, land. 
 
 Par. Lost. 1. 380—475. 3 Herod. 2, 44. clearly marks 
 
 2 Fourmont, Reflexions Cri- the different nature of these 
 tiques sur les Anciens Peuples. two kinds of worship. That 
 " Que Junon est Rebecca" is paid to the gods was Oveiv, to 
 the title of Ch. 12. Lib. ii. § 3. heroes ivayifciv. 
 
ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 141 
 
 We must then seek in some other cause than 
 the human origin of the gods, the explanation of 
 the fact, that there is so much in ancient theology 
 which resembles the history of human beings. 
 Man extends to the world around him, the prin- 
 cipal analogies of his own condition ; he does not 
 rest satisfied with the simple personification of 
 the powers of nature ; he endeavours to make 
 this personality supply a solution to the great pro- 
 blems which excite his curiosity. Life and its 
 perpetual reproduction was one of these, and the 
 most natural mode of conceiving of it was, to 
 personify the energies of nature under the image 
 of a male and female, to whose union the un- 
 ceasing renewal of the world was ascribed. This 
 idea pervades the mythologies of Egypt and Asia, 
 and being carried out in symbolical narrative and 
 rites, became a fertile source of the corrupt and 
 debasing influence which polytheism exercised 
 upon the public manners. The deities thus cre- 
 ated by a rude philosophy and a sensual imagina- 
 tion were easily identified with those objects and 
 elements of nature which bear the most conspi- 
 cuous part in the production of all things. The 
 Sun, the noblest visible representation of invisible 
 power, whose rays call forth the vital energies of 
 
142 ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM. 
 
 the world ; the Earth, which receives his influence 
 and acknowledges it by her boundless fertility ; 
 Water, which nourishes animal and vegetable life ; 
 Fire, without whose genial influence torpor and 
 death would overspread the world ; Air, which 
 seems the very principle of life itself, — all these, 
 in a double aspect, as male or female, became 
 persons, and acquired a history. The heavenly 
 bodies, Sun, Moon, and Planets, bear a real rela- 
 tion, more or less influential, to our system ; and 
 this, seen in obscure glimpses, in an age when 
 true science was in its infancy, was exaggerated 
 by imagination into a divine control over human 
 affairs, exercised by gods who dwelt in those orbs, 
 or were identified with them. The Sun and Moon, 
 especially, were invested with the dignity of king 
 and queen of heaven, a personification familiar to 
 the poetry of all nations, and easily passing into 
 popular belief and historical tradition. 1 When 
 the world was once peopled with divinities thus 
 created, the further extension of mythology and 
 the character it assumed depended on the people 
 among whom it was received. In Egypt and the 
 East it hardly ever lost its original significance, 
 as a symbolical expression ; the lively imagination 
 
 1 Aapirpovs dwdaras, ifiirpsTrovras c»0epi. iEsch. Ag. 6. Gen. 1.16. 
 
GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLE. 143 
 
 of the Greeks expanded and adorned it with so 
 much adventitious matter, having no relation to 
 its original purpose, that in their mythology a 
 symbolical meaning is rarely visible. Intellectual 
 abstractions and moral qualities also from personi- 
 fications passed into persons, who were reputed 
 to have been deified for the possession, in a pre- 
 eminent degree, of the quality which they repre- 
 sented. 
 
 That fear first led men to believe in the gods, 1 is 
 an assertion without historical evidence ; but as na- 
 ture and life and man's own frame contain a mixture 
 of good and evil, their reflected image, the superna- 
 tural beings who preside over the powers of the 
 Universe, and control the course of human events, 
 could not be purely benevolent. To regard evil 
 as corrective, and therefore as a part of the plan 
 of a beneficent Providence, is a comprehension of 
 view which reason never seems to have attained ; 
 and even the earliest mythology of the East bears 
 marks of its struggle to effect some solution of 
 this painful mystery. The Persian theology makes 
 a formal division of power between the good and 
 evil Principle, retaining only the triumph of the 
 good, as the final consummation ; and the same 
 1 Stat. Theb. 3, 661. 
 
144 GOOD AND EVIL PRINCIPLE. 
 
 doctrine appears, though less distinctly, in the 
 creed of the Mesopotamian nations, whose Satan 
 was a subordinate and dependent being, the mi- 
 nister, not the rival and enemy, of the supreme 
 God. The Indian theology makes good alone to 
 have been the purpose of the Creator, evil the 
 result of transgression, but assigns no special 
 deity as the representative of the evil Principle. 1 
 In the characters and actions of the Grecian divini- 
 ties, good and bad are so much mingled, that no 
 necessity appears to have been felt to erect the 
 powers of evil into a distinct existence. 
 
 Though fear did not create the gods, it was a 
 predominant element in those conceptions of 
 them, of which prayer and worship are the ex- 
 pression ; the mind of man being more accessible 
 to religious emotions in the apprehension of suffer- 
 ing, than in the enjoyment or anticipation of good; 
 and more quick to observe the marks of superna- 
 tural agency, in those events which appear to in- 
 terrupt the usual and beneficent operation of the 
 powers of nature. The god of an ignorant and 
 superstitious people is made in the image of man, 
 not only endowed with the form and organs of 
 humanity, but partaking of its feelings and im- 
 1 Bohlen altes Indien, 1, 166. 
 
SACRIFICE. 145 
 
 perfections. Sacrifices were offered with various 
 motives, and infinite diversity of manner, but all 
 resolve themselves into an assimilation of the divi- 
 nity to the worshipper. The first and choicest of 
 the fruits of the earth were presented to the god 
 who had given them, as the natural expression of 
 gratitude ; among living things, some were only 
 consecrated to him, by being exempted from their 
 usual office of ministering to the use of man, that 
 the sincerity of the offerer might be proved by his 
 renouncing all future profit from his gift. 1 It was 
 sometimes more completely alienated, by being 
 slain and burnt, that its smoke and savour might 
 ascend to the upper regions, where the gods were 
 supposed to have their special dwelling-place. But 
 sacrifice had other and darker aspects. The dis- 
 pleasure and vengeance of men are not always dis- 
 criminating, nor in their degree proportioned to 
 their cause. If prevented from wreaking them on 
 the person of the offender, they are soothed and 
 appeased by inflicting loss on his property or his 
 kindred. By skilfully presenting to the angry 
 man, some object on which his rage may spend 
 itself, the cause of his displeasure may hope to 
 escape. The transference of such passionate blind - 
 1 S. Chrys. apud Outram de Sacrifices, p. 7. 
 H 
 
146 SACRIFICE. 
 
 ness to the gods, appears to have been the origin 
 of deprecatory and expiatory sacrifices, which have 
 been bloody and barbarous, in proportion to the 
 ignorance and rudeness of the people by whom 
 they have been practised, or the magnitude of 
 the evil which they were designed to avert. If 
 the blood of brute animals were not sufficiently 
 costly to appease divine wrath, a human substi- 
 tute was offered, and the sacrifice by which the 
 feelings of nature were most deeply wounded, was 
 deemed most likely to be efficacious. Panic terror, 
 when it has only an earthly object, can efface all 
 natural affection ; the dread of the displeasure of 
 the gods, in times of public calamity, has so 
 overpowered all other sentiments, that heca- 
 tombs of human victims have been offered up, 
 in the hope of averting it. It belongs to the 
 special history of every country to point out the 
 variety of forms which the same principle has 
 assumed, but the key to them all will be found 
 in the proneness of man to suppose that the god 
 whom he worships is " altogether such a one as 
 himself." 
 
 The belief in the existence of a thinking and 
 conscious principle in man, which the dissolution 
 of the body does not destroy, was diffused among 
 
 
IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 147 
 
 all the nations of the highest antiquity. 1 The 
 analogies of material nature could furnish no 
 ground for believing in the separate existence of 
 spirit. It is so closely connected with the belief 
 in God, that its origin is probably the same ; the 
 internal consciousness that the seat of the intellect 
 and the moral qualities is something distinct from 
 the body, which may therefore not only not be 
 affected by its destruction, but may even be more 
 perfect and happy when freed from its corporeal 
 shackles. 
 
 The idea of God being derived, as we have seen, 
 from the consciousness of man, it was natural that 
 the soul in which that consciousness resides should 
 be identified with the divine nature which it re- 
 sembles, and be considered as a portion of its 
 essence, temporarily united with the body. 
 
 With the conception of the soul as indestructible, 
 the idea of a retributory state has been united in va- 
 rious forms. Such a doctrine is forced upon the mind 
 which has acquired even the most imperfect idea of 
 Providence and a moral governor, by the unequal 
 retribution of the present state. Among the old- 
 est nations, the Egyptians and Indians, it appears 
 in a very remarkable form — the transmigration of 
 1 Windet De Vita functorum statu. 
 
 h2 
 
148 IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL. 
 
 souls. The Persian doctrine of a resurrection 
 does not appear to have penetrated to the Meso- 
 potamian nations at a very early time, as we find 
 no traces of it among the Jews, till after the Cap- 
 tivity, nor have we any distinct accounts of the 
 belief of the Babylonians and Assyrians on this 
 point. The Greeks and the nations of kindred 
 origin, from the earliest times, entertained the 
 notion of a state of retribution, in Elysium or 
 Tartarus, immediately succeeding the present life; 
 yet even among them, traces of a belief in the 
 return of the soul to occupy a human body may 
 be found. 1 The conceptions of an unseen state 
 cannot be very definite or constant, and it is not 
 surprising if some usages or modes of speech seem 
 to regard death as the extinction of being, and 
 others as a transition or advancement to a higher 
 state. The belief in the existence of disembodied 
 spirits mingled itself in various ways with the 
 other articles of theology. A continued con- 
 sciousness and activity suggested the idea of in- 
 terest and participation in the events of the world. 
 A higher prescience and supernatural power, an 
 intermediate rank between mortals and immor- 
 tals, seemed to belong to those who resembled 
 1 Pind. Olymp. 2, 122. 
 
SACERDOTAL ORDER. 149 
 
 the gods in their spiritual nature, and they were 
 propitiated, and their favourable intervention in- 
 voked, by a peculiar ritual. 
 
 In all the early civilized countries we find an 
 order of men, a priesthood, specially consecrated to 
 the offices of religion. A practice so universal must 
 have its origin in an universal feeling. Invisible 
 power is invested at once with sanctity and awe in 
 the believer's mind ; he thinks himself not pure 
 enough to hold a direct intercourse with his god, 
 and seeks some one whom he regards as more 
 holy, to act as his mediator. He endeavours to 
 find an intercessor with god, as he would with his 
 sovereign, if he had occasion to ask his favour or 
 deprecate his anger, in a person of higher rank, 
 greater refinement, or superior moral and intel- 
 lectual qualities, who from these causes may have 
 more ready access and more favourable audience 
 than himself. The parent would naturally be the 
 priest in the simple rites of domestic religion; 
 the patriarchal head in those of his tribe ; the 
 chief of the nation, in national festivities and 
 sacrifices. In a more elaborate system of faith 
 and worship, the duties of the priesthood grow so 
 numerous that they suffice for the occupation of a 
 life ; the idea of purity, moral and physical, is 
 
150 SACERDOTAL ORDER. 
 
 refined upon and exalted, so that a separation 
 from ordinary pursuits, seclusion within the walls 
 of a sanctuary, the devotion of a considerable 
 portion of life to ablution, meditation and prayer, 
 become essential to the character of the mediator 
 between God and man ; and the distinction arises 
 of the priest from the layman. An order of men 
 so created, especially when it has become heredi- 
 tary, rapidly increases in influence and wealth. 
 Their predominant influence in the state is cha- 
 racteristic of all the forms of polity which in the 
 ancient world preceded the rise of the Grecian 
 commonwealths. It rose to the greatest height 
 in Egypt, where perhaps, before the commence- 
 ment of the monarchy, the priests constituted a 
 theocracy, i. e. exercised the powers of government 
 in the name of the gods. Since the belief in a 
 deity is inseparable from the mind of man, a 
 priesthood may be regarded, in some form or 
 other, as one of the most truly primaeval institu- 
 tions. A sacerdotal order soon adopts purposes 
 and a policy which may be hostile to the interests 
 of other classes in the community; and it is 
 tempted to extend and uphold its power by 
 hypocrisy and fraud. But it is not in such arts 
 that their authority begins • a strong and general 
 
IDOLATRY. 151 
 
 feeling must give birth to an institution which 
 everywhere accompanies the existence of religion. 
 It is when faith begins to languish, and the yoke 
 of sacerdotal dominion to be impatiently borne, 
 that a priesthood is tempted to use violence or 
 fraud to prolong its power. 
 
 Idolatry is found everywhere in early history 
 as the companion of polytheism. It is the re- 
 source of the mind, unable to keep its own ab- 
 stractions steadily before its view ; and the natural 
 result of a tendency to use visible things, as the 
 symbol of the invisible, and the propensity of man 
 to attribute a human form to his divinities. The 
 Persians are almost a solitary exception ; and that 
 they had neither statues nor altars was probably 
 owing to their religion being a pure worship of the 
 heavenly bodies and the elements, 1 which needed no 
 symbols, as they are not abstractions but sensible 
 realities. When the art of statuary was unknown, 
 the rudest resemblance to the human form was suf- 
 ficient to invest a block of stone or stock of wood 
 with this symbolical character. Such were the Cy- 
 bele of Pessinus, the conical stone of the Paphian 
 Venus, and the god Elagabalus, 2 which, even in an 
 age familiar with the most perfect productions 
 
 1 Herod. 1, 131. Creuz. Mythol. 1, 182. 2 Herodian, 5, 5. 
 
152 
 
 IDOLATRY. 
 
 of sculpture, retained a traditional sanctity, and 
 were more highly valued for the evidence of an- 
 tiquity which the absence of art furnished. Un- 
 der the name of Fetisch worship, this homage paid 
 to a shapeless mass has been regarded as marking 
 the lowest point of idolatry; yet it does not 
 appear probable that even the most senseless ido- 
 later really believes a lifeless image to be god. 
 Like the sword and spear of Mars, which the 
 Scythians and Romans worshipped, 1 it is a sym- 
 bol ; but the sign readily becomes a substitute for 
 the thing signified, and the use of any material 
 emblem of the deity tends to detain the mind in 
 gross and unspiritual conceptions. 
 
 Superstition is, in substance, a false philosophy; 
 but while the error of a philosophical inquirer into 
 nature terminates with the assumption of an 
 imaginary law, or non-existent principle, supersti- 
 tion usually creates some being of super-human 
 power, endowed with passions and a will, to whose 
 agency it attributes the phenomenon by which it 
 is perplexed. In either case, however, we shall 
 find, that the source of the error is false reason- 
 ing from effects to causes, incomplete induction, 
 hasty admission of unascertained facts, confusion 
 1 Voss. de Idol. lib. 6. p. 150. Varro Fragm. l.p.375 ed. Bip. 
 
SUPERSTITION. 153 
 
 of accidental resemblances with real analogies. 
 This is very remarkably seen in the belief uni- 
 versally prevalent in the earliest ages, that a fore- 
 knowledge of the future may be obtained. Had 
 there been in the present no foreshadowing of 
 events to come, man would have learned to ac- 
 quiesce in a hopeless ignorance. But the present 
 is really pregnant with the future ; sagacity can 
 anticipate the general effect of causes which even 
 now are in operation. This, however, is far from 
 satisfying the craving of human curiosity, which 
 seeks a knowledge of specific events and especially 
 of coming evil. The modes which have been 
 adopted for attaining it have not been arbitrarily 
 chosen. Many of them consisted in attempts to 
 draw forth from the gods the secret of their own 
 decrees ; or from inferior deities that knowledge 
 of the counsels of the supreme god, which their 
 relation to him enabled them to acquire ; or from 
 departed spirits some revelation of those myste- 
 ries of destiny, which they were supposed to be 
 better able to penetrate in their disembodied state. 
 As these supernatural beings partake of human 
 weakness, it was thought that they might be 
 soothed by gifts, driven by importunate intreaty, 
 or even entrapped by dexterous management, into 
 h 5 
 
154 DIVINATION. 
 
 the disclosure of the secret which they had deter- 
 mined to keep in their own breasts. The hea- 
 venly bodies accomplish their own times with such 
 unerring regularity, that they seem endowed with 
 prescience, as well as volition, and look down on 
 human affairs with such a bright and comprehen- 
 sive gaze, that all knowledge appears to lie open 
 to them. Their movements regulate the seasons, 
 which involve so many points of interest to man, 
 and it is not wonderful if he should have ex- 
 tended this influence to other things, on which 
 their position and combination has no real effect. 
 What Virgil, in the spirit of Epicurean philoso- 
 phy denied, 1 that a portion of the divine spirit 
 dwells in the brute creation, and produces the 
 instinctive sagacity which surpasses our reason, is 
 quite in accordance with popular belief, and must 
 have seemed a good ground for attributing to 
 them foreknowledge of other things, besides what 
 regarded their own life and wants. The birds, 
 from their abode in the air, were presumed to be 
 nearer to the gods, and better acquainted with 
 their secrets than other animals ; the eagle tower- 
 ing into the skies, returns thence as if from the 
 immediate presence of the deity. The thunder 
 1 Georg. 1, 415. 
 
SUPERSTITION ATTACHED TO NUMBERS. 155 
 
 and lightning, issuing from the same mysterious 
 region, seem like the voice of a god, or a written 
 proclamation of his will, traced in characters of 
 fire. To judge of the future from inspection of 
 the entrails of a victim, and hope or fear, accord- 
 ing as the liver was diseased or sound, seems the 
 extreme of childish superstition ; yet no doubt it 
 had been observed, that the lower animals are 
 affected sometimes even before man, by epidemic 
 diseases ; l and thus the approach of a public cala- 
 mity might truly be read in the unsound state of 
 the organs of a slaughtered animal. These are 
 indeed slight foundations for the complex science 
 of a Chaldean soothsayer or Tuscan augur; nor 
 can we always perceive even this slight ground for 
 the practices of divination ; it is enough that, when 
 their origin can be traced, it appears to be the 
 exaggeration of a connection which really exists, 
 the fanciful extension of a true analogy. 
 
 The superstition which from the earliest ages 
 has attached to certain numbers, has had its origin 
 in their occurrence in the changes of nature, and 
 in the periodicity of some of the phsenomena of 
 life. 2 Seven is the number of the planets ac- 
 cording to the ancient notion, which included the 
 1 Schol. Vill. ad Horn. II. A, 50. 2 Varro ap. Gell. 3, 10. 
 
156 OMENS. 
 
 Sun and Moon ; twelve, the changes of the Moon 
 in a year ; thirty, the approximate number of days 
 in a lunation. To all these numbers, and others 
 produced by their combination, a mysterious vir- 
 tue has evidently been attached. They have been 
 adopted in preference to others, where division 
 may seem arbitrary ; they recur in mythology and 
 mythic history. 
 
 The proneness of man to consider himself as 
 the central point of the system to which he be- 
 longs, and his own welfare as its primary and 
 highest object, has greatly enlarged the range of 
 superstitious belief and practice in regard to divi- 
 nation. To warn him of approaching evil, or point 
 out to him the means of acquiring good, is a 
 purpose of sufficient importance, to justify por- 
 tents in heaven and earth ; and in ages of little 
 scientific culture this tendency to refer everything 
 to himself is not counteracted by any knowledge 
 of the true relations of Nature, or the unchange- 
 ableness of her laws. This disposition to believe 
 the world around him to be full of the indica- 
 tions of his own destiny^ is allied to that which 
 leads him to make external nature a symbol and 
 emblem of his own feelings, in the language of 
 religion, of poetry, and art. For religion, and 
 
DREAMS. 157 
 
 its degenerate form superstition, are essentially 
 states of excited imagination. 
 
 The influence of dreams, in the earliest ages, as 
 indications of the future, deserves to be especially 
 noticed, from its connection with great historical 
 events. The dreams of Pharaoh changed the his- 
 tory of the Jewish people ; Sabaco withdrew from 
 Egypt in obedience to a dream; Astyages exposed 
 his grandson, and ultimately overturned his own 
 empire, through terror of a dream. The dream 
 of Xerxes decided the invasion of Greece, and 
 remotely the fate of Persia; the dream of Cal- 
 purnia, in a less philosophical age, would have 
 prevented the assassination of Csesar. That a 
 man should permit the incoherent suggestions of 
 sleep to guide his actions, and even to set aside 
 the combinations of sagacity, appears hardly con- 
 sistent with the attribute of reason. Yet it has a 
 natural cause. The mind often reproduces in 
 dreams the results of the meditations of the day, 
 and presents them with a scenic vividness which 
 impresses them more strongly than mere medita- 
 tion. This connection, however, is not perceived, 
 when the laws which regulate our trains of 
 thought have not been studied : it is because the 
 dream springs up within the mind itself, that it 
 
158 DREAMS. 
 
 carries more authority than the deductions of 
 reason. Detached from all impressions of the 
 world of sense, the mind is more fitted for receiv- 
 ing communications from the world of spirit, and 
 the convictions thus stamped upon it appear to 
 proceed from a divine hand. It is on the same 
 principle, that words casually spoken or taken out 
 of their real connection, have been supposed to 
 carry a supernatural import, and the gods to 
 speak through the mouths of those whose facul- 
 ties are suspended by a trance or a fit, or even 
 impaired by fatuity. We are prone also to notice 
 the exception, more than the rule, of our expe- 
 rience ; and hence one remarkable coincidence 
 between a supposed prognostic and the event pro- 
 cures credit for such a mode of judging of the 
 future, which many failures cannot destroy. 
 
 Such is the appearance which society presents, 
 when its features first become visible to us in the 
 dawn of historic times, in Egypt and the East. 
 We may rely with some confidence on the general 
 causes which have been assigned for its peculia- 
 rities, because they are found in human nature, 
 and are invariable. The special causes, the histo- 
 rical events which determined the distribution of 
 
LATE ORIGIN OF HISTORY. 159 
 
 population, the peculiar forms of religion and go- 
 vernment, the state of knowledge and art, elude 
 our research ; they have not been recorded, and 
 cannot be divined. Nor have we reason to hope 
 that monuments and records will carry the com- 
 mencement of history much further back, because 
 the application of writing to the preservation of 
 facts has been late, or time has destroyed its 
 earliest results. The discoveries in Egyptian anti- 
 quities have only introduced a continuous chro- 
 nology into periods of which we had no previous 
 measure, and filled blank spaces with historical 
 names and events ; they have established the credit 
 of accounts which had previously been viewed with 
 scepticism, but they have added nothing to our 
 knowledge of the commencement of the history of 
 Egypt, the origin of its population, arts, laws and 
 religion. When civilization has regained posses- 
 sion of its ancient seats in Asia, monuments now 
 covered by the soil may be brought to light, and 
 patient research unravel the secret of their myste- 
 rious characters. But there will still remain, 
 before the earliest inscription, ages which we must 
 be content to know only in their results, the in- 
 fancy of the human race, too unconscious of its 
 relation to the future, to reflect upon and re- 
 
160 IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY. 
 
 gister the steps by which it was advancing to 
 maturity. 
 
 The causes which have buried primaeval history 
 in impenetrable darkness, extend their influence 
 over many centuries, and make our knowledge of 
 them obscure, imperfect, and comparatively unin- 
 structive. Were not the impulse to possess our- 
 selves of any information respecting the past irre- 
 sistible, we might wonder at the eagerness with 
 which we endeavour to establish on evidence, only 
 probable at best, a few insulated facts in the histo- 
 tories of Egypt or Assyria. Their monuments 
 show by their magnitude and durability the vast 
 amount of labour concentrated in their execution, 
 and hence enable us to infer the wealth and popu- 
 lation of the kingdom, and the powers which 
 despotism gave to the monarch, of employing the 
 labour of his subjects for his own gratification, or 
 the authority of the religion, to whose rites these 
 structures were dedicated. But how little can we 
 learn of that which makes history most valuable, 
 of the characters of sovereigns, of civil, military and 
 religious institutions, of laws and their influence 
 on the happiness of the community ! Only nations 
 which have left us literature, as well as monuments, 
 can be so fully known, as either to be intelligible 
 
IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY. 161 
 
 themselves, or furnish us with any principles of 
 historical philosophy. If the hopes of some san- 
 guine antiquaries should be realized, and we should 
 find ourselves in possession of a written history of 
 the age of Rameses the Great, more light will 
 probably be thrown on the condition of Egypt 
 than all its monuments have hitherto afforded us. 
 The Jewish people have no monuments ; not an 
 inscribed stone, not a sculpture or a fresco, re- 
 mains from the times of their distinct existence, 
 none at least that bears anything of a national cha- 
 racter. But they have left us a literature of copi- 
 ousness and variety, unexampled in the ages in 
 which it was produced. From it we learn the 
 origin and fortunes of the people, the influence of 
 outward circumstances and their own peculiar in- 
 stitutions in the formation of their character; 
 their alternations of prosperity and depression, of 
 improvement or degeneracy ; their public history 
 and domestic life ; not only the outward forms of 
 their religion, but its influence, as penetrating and 
 modifying the whole national mind. They are, 
 therefore, the only nation of equal antiquity whom 
 we really know. The mighty monarchies in their 
 neighbourhood, between whom they preserved a 
 precarious existence, are not understood by us; 
 
162 
 
 IMPERFECTION OF EARLY HISTORY, 
 
 we see them only in the mass, in the exploits of 
 conquering sovereigns, while the true connection of 
 the events of their history, the internal life of the 
 people, escape from us. It is not till the Greeks 
 began to turn their inquisitive gaze upon Egypt 
 and the East, that these countries emerge into day- 
 light ; and it is only in Greece itself, under the 
 combined influence of science, literature and free- 
 dom, that the perfect idea of history was realized. 
 
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