IT is hardly necessary to say that the preceding chapters do not contain all the facts upon which those who believe in the great antiquity of the human race chiefly rely. It is, indeed, by no means only of late years, or among archaeologists, that the difficulties in Archbishop Usher's chronology have been felt to be insuperable. Historians, philologists, and physiologists have alike admitted that the short period allowed could hardly be reconciled with the history of some eastern nations, that it did not leave room for the development either of the different languages, or of the numerous physical peculiarities, by which the various races of men are distinguished.

Thus, Dr. Prichard says, “Many writers who have been by no means inclined to raise objections against the authority of the Sacred Scriptures, and in particular Michaelis, have felt themselves embarrassed by the shortness of the interval between the Noachic Deluge and the period at which the records of various nations commence, or the earliest date to which their historical memorials lead us back. The extravagant claims to a remote and almost fathomless antiquity, made by the fabulists of many ancient nations, have vanished before the touch of accurate criticism; but after abstracting all that is apparently mythological from the early traditions of the Indians, Egyptians, and some other nations, the probable history of some of them seems still to reach up to a period too remote to be reconciled with the short chronology of Usher and Petavius. This has been so universally felt by all those writers who have entered on the investigation of primeval history that it is superfluous to dwell upon the subject.”