My Library

ages.’ “The old man smiled at my antiquarian enthusiasm, and merely remarked, that Meses and the chronologists had better be looking out for their laurels, else the parvenus of the present day would not leave many to be gathered. “ ‘It is my invincible conviction,’ said I, ‘that these sculptures were wrought many ages prior to the making of the pottery found beneath the valley of the Nile; and that the inscriptions on yonder porphyritic tablets were engraved there a hundred centuries before the date of Adam— an individual, by the way, whom I certainly regard as having had an origin and existence in the imaginations of ancient poets, a mere myth, handed down the night of Time as an heirloom to the ages—at least all such as had a taste for things they could not comprehend—and had an existence there only!’ “ ‘Then you do not entertain the belief that all men sprang from only one source?’ “ ‘Yes—no. Yes; because God created all. No; because there are at least ten separate and distinct families of human kind!’ “ ‘But may not all these differences spring from climate and the diverse localizations and circumstances attending upon a wide separation of the constituents of an original family?’