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The solar year, the lunar month, and the day were the units, and it is owing to their incommensurability that we find so many calendars proposed and in use at different times. The only object to be attained by comparing the chronologies of ancient races is to fix the actual dates of observations recorded, and this is not a part of a history of astronomy.
But let me, now that I have come to man's estate, flout my old pedagogues, and, playing truant at my will, dawdle or labor, walk, skip, or run, go to my middle in quagmires, or climb to the hill-tops, take liberties with the venerable, snub the respectable, and keep the company of the disreputable, dismiss the Archbishop without reading his homily, pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes to greet a little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo, speak to the forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them reverence, read here one little catch which came from lips long ago as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten fragment of history, too insignificant to make its way into the world's magnificent chronologies, snapping up unconsidered trifles of anecdote, tasting some long-interred bon-mot and relishing some disentombed scandal, pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the younger, and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes his truncheon in the face of Plato.
"I fear that you are taking our friend Abraham too literally, Mr. Ware," he said, in that gentle semblance of paternal tones which seemed to go so well with his gown. "Modern research, you know, quite wipes him out of existence as an individual. The word 'Abram' is merely an eponym it means 'exalted father. Practically all the names in the Genesis chronologies are what we call eponymous.
Moreouer here is to be noted, that if he procured the faith of Christ to be planted within this realme in the time of Eleutherius the Romane bishop, the same chanced in the daies of the emperour Marcus Aurelius Antonius; and about the time that Lucius Aurelius Commodus was ioined and made partaker of the empire with his father, which was seuen yéere after the death of Lucius Aelius, Aurelius Verus, and in the 177 after the birth of our Sauiour Iesus Christ, as by some chronologies is easie to be collected.
Until science shall reconcile the various chronologies with the one usually received, there is but little satisfaction in the study of Egyptian history prior to Abram. Nor is it easy to settle when the Pyramids were constructed.
To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. 'We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns.
If, as seems most likely, there was in South America an ancient development of civilized human life, out of which arose the civilizations found in Peru and Central America, its antiquity was much greater than can be comprehended by the current chronologies.
But Ralph learned from her what most Sunday-school teachers fail to teach, the great lesson of Christianity, by the side of which all antiquities and geographies and chronologies and exegetics and other niceties are as nothing. And now he turned the head of the roan toward the cottage of Miss Nancy Sawyer as naturally as the roan would have gone to his own stall in the stable at home.
What we find is, that the great series of formations represents a period of time of which our human chronologies hardly afford us a unit of measure. I will not pretend to say how we ought to estimate this time, in millions or in billions of years. For my purpose, the determination of its absolute duration is wholly unessential. But that the time was enormous there can be no question.
So far as I am aware, there is no mention of such migrations in the most ancient times; but the omission proves nothing, for before the Normans, before the game laws and parks together came into existence, no one who could write thought enough of the deer to notice their motions. The monks were engaged in chronicling the inroads of the pagans, or writing chronologies of the Roman Empire.
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