“ sehoolboy-days are vividly stamped upon the leaflets of memory.
“ Youth, however, merges insensibly into childhood; but beyond his
“ seventh year even the child’s remembrance fades away into infancy.
“ Here and there some circumstance, more or less important in his
“ awakening history, flashes like a meteor, or flits like an ignis fatuus,
“ across his mind; Of its positive occurrence he is morally sure; of
“ its date in relation to his own age at the time, onwards perhaps
“ from his third birthday, he knows nothing; except what he may
“ attain through inductive reasoning guided by the reports of others
“—his own self-accredited reminiscence of the event being more fre-
“ quently than not, but the reflex of what may have been told h im,
“ in after life, by witnesses or logopceists.434 His cradle-hours ante-
“ date his own memory: their incidents he has gathered from domes-
“ tic traditions, or infers them hy later observation of nursery-ecc-
“ nomy with other babies. Ask him now—4 When were you born?’
1 Our man knows not. He accepts his first birthday upon faith, | the
“ evidence of things unseen;’435 its epoch he receives upon hearsay.
“ The accounts he has heard of his infantile life, from nativity to his
“ second or third year, may be true enough; but, to himself, they are
“ anything rather than certainties.
“ How, 4 the life of nations is long, and their traditions are liable
“ to alteration; but that which memory is to individual man, history
“ is to mankind in general.’433 Viewing our Cosmic man, then, as
“ the symbol of the history of all humanity; and sweeping our tele-
“ Scopes over the world’s monumental and documentary chronicles
“ extant at this day; at what age of humanity’s life do the petro-
“ glyphs of the oldest historical nation, the Egyptians, first present
“ themselves to the archaeologist ?—that is, was the -earliest known
“ civilization of the Nile's denizens, as now attested by the most
“ ancient stone-reeords. at Memphis, infantile, puerile,, adolescent, or
“ adult? At which of the five stages of seven years, mystically
“ assumed by the old philosophers to be preliminaries of their ‘ great
“ climacteric,’ do we encounter the first Egyptian, at the IHd Memp
h it e dynasty, taken with Lepsius ahout the 35th eentury B.C.,
“ or some 5300 years backward from our present hour ?
i “ You will find, after examination of the plates437 before you, which
484 M a u r y , Ligen des Pieuses du Moyen-Äge, Paris, 8 v o . , 1 8 4 3 ; p p . 2 3 9 , 2 6 2 - 8 , '2 6 1 - 7 7 .
435 “ A conviction of things u n s e e n P a u i, Epistle to the Hebrews, xi. 1:—Sh a r pe ’s Hew
Testament, p. 406.
436 De Brotonne, Filiations ei Migrations des Peuples.
«t T.rpsiuh. Denkmäler aus MSgypten, Abth. I, B. 1 - 4 0 ; or thereabouts, which, with other
tableaux, were suspended in front of the audience. Cf., also, some deductions from their
study, developed in the same lecture, in Types of Mankind, pp. 4 1 2 - 4 : and add now endless
confirmations resulting through M a b i e t t e ’s later discoveries (supra, p. 4 8 9 - 9 4 ) .
“ are authentic copies of the oldest sculptures of man now known
“upon earth, that neither infancy nor childhood is represented by
“ ^iese m°st ancient of records, hardly even adolescence; but that the
“ first Egyptian beheld on these archaic hieroglyphs, leaps at a bound
“ from out of the night of unnumbered generations antecedent to his
“ day, a fall-grown, if a young, man — endowed with a civilization
“ already so advanced 5300 years ago, that it requires an eye most
“-experienced m Nilotic art to detect differences of style between
“these primordial sculptures of the Hid, IVth, and Vth dynasties
“ and those of the more florid Diospolitan, or Augustan, period of
“the XVHth and XVHIth dynasties, carved twenty centuries later,
“ and during Mosaic times in Egypt!”
Such a practised eye is the gift of our erudite collaborator M.
Pulszky; and to his paper (ante, Chapter H), I beg leave, to refer the
reader for accurate details; closing, for myself, further definitions of
chronology with the philosophical comment of A. ~W. von Schlegel:438
Time has conveyed to us many kinds of chronology: it is the
business of historical criticism to distinguish between them and to
estimate their value. The astronomical chronology changes purely
theoretic cycles into historical periods; the mythical makes its way 1
supported by obscure genealogical tables; the hypothetic is an invention
of either ancient or modern chronographers; and, lastly, the
documentary rests upon the parallel uninterrupted demarcation of
events, according to a settled reckoning of years. The last alone
deserves to he called 4 chronology’ in the strictest sense ; it begins, however
much later than is commonly supposed. Had this been duly considered,
we might have dispensed with many an air-built system.”
( Egypt, oldest of historical lands, representing, therefore, but the
“ middle ages” of mankind’s development upon earth, typified by our
cosmic man, arrived at one-third of the “ three-score and ten years,”
imagined by Hebrew writers to be the average of post-Mosaic439
human longevity, it follows that, at the Hid dynasty, say 5300 years
ago, the Egyptians at least, among, very likely, other oriental nations
whose annals are lost, had long before passed through their periods
Of adolescence, childhood,;and infancy, If we reflect that, since the
tall of Grecian culture—itself built upon thousands of years of experience
acquired by preceding Eastern nationalities already, during
me palmy day. of Hellas, in their superannuation or decrepitude —
rt has required, some 2000 years of knowledge accumulated upon
Knowledge, of inventions heaped upon discoveries, for our civilizader
^yptiechen Mythologie * * * und Ohrgnologie (Prichard’s) Vorrede,
Aoo7; pp. xliv-1. |H
439 Types o f Mankind, pp. 706-12.