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But the latest and most advanced school of geological speculation does not exclude “Catastrophism,” and, therefore, will not deny the possibility of sudden and great changes by this method. Doubtless the antiquity of the human race is much greater than is usually assumed by those whose views of the past are still regulated by mediæval systems of chronology.
It was with consistency that the writer of the Chronicles could say as he has said, 1 Chron. i. 43, "These are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king ever the children of Israel," because he was going to give, and has given, a list of the kings that had reigned in Israel; but as it is impossible that the same expression could have been used before that period, it is as certain as any thing can be proved from historical language, that this part of Genesis is taken from Chronicles, and that Genesis is not so old as Chronicles, and probably not so old as the book of Homer, or as AEsop's Fables; admitting Homer to have been, as the tables of chronology state, contemporary with David or Solomon, and AEsop to have lived about the end of the Jewish monarchy.
"I arose, and amid a hush of expectation excited by this motion, accompanied as it were with a gesture inviting silence, spoke aloud in English: "'My friends, I recall a night in August, 1890, in the Earth's chronology, when my son and myself, then hoping against hope that the carefully adjusted receiver we had, would ever be called upon to herald a message from another world, were suddenly surprised to see and hear the register of our instrument move and sound.
It is a large, heavy ring, weighing 1 ounce, 6 pennyweights, 12 grains, was worn on the thumb, and taken from the mummy at Memphis. It was purchased by Mr Sams at the sale of Mr Salt's collection in the year 1835, for upwards of L.50, and is highly prized by the present proprietor. Some doubt still rests upon Egyptian chronology.
The kingdoms symbolized by the first three beasts of this vision have no particular bearing on our subject, aside from assisting us in fixing the chronology of certain events.
If any secret reference had been intended in the romance to the real character of the illustrious introducer of an art which has been productive of such incalculable benefits to mankind, it would be impossible to account for such a marvellous inconsistence in the chronology.
And even if we turn to the oldest periods of geologic history, although the nature of the materials is changed, although we cannot apply to them the same reasonings that we can to the existing corals, yet still there are vast masses of limestone formed of nothing else than the accumulations of the skeletons of similar animals, and testifying that even in those remote periods of the world's history, as now, the order of things implies that the earth had already endured for a period of which our ordinary standards of chronology give us not the slightest conception.
The texts are full of allusions to the deeds and fortunes of the gods, but only a very small number of these allusions are intelligible to us. "The time has gone by in which it was thought possible to furnish the chronology of Egyptian history, and in which that history was supposed to be known, because the succession of the most powerful kings had been ascertained.
This remains, after all possible deductions for 'ignorance of physical science, 'errors in numbers and chronology, 'interpolations' 'mistakes of transcribers' and so forth, whereof we have read of late a great deal too much, and ought to care for them and for their existence, or non-existence, simply nothing at all; because, granting them all though the greater part of them I do not grant, as far as I can trust my critical faculty there remains that unique element, beside which all these accidents are but as the spots on the sun compared to the great glory of his life-giving light.
Their kings can be traced by tradition to a time long prior to the recorded genealogy of any other tribe, and Inachus, the father of the Pelasgian Phoroneus, is but another name for the remotest era to which Grecian chronology can ascend . Whether the Pelasgi were anciently a foreign or a Grecian tribe, has been a subject of constant and celebrated discussion.
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