remain of their faiths and beliefs and superstitions; and we fancy, as
we gain a clearer insight into them, that we are approaching more nearly
to the mysterious Source of all life in the soul. The germ, to our
limited comprehension, seems nearer the Creator than the perfected
growth. Then the great problem of _Origin_ forever attracts us on,--the
multitudinous and intricate questions relating to "the ordained becoming
of beings": how the Creating Power has worked, whether through an almost
endless chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and
miraculous _ictus_, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as
an abode and instrument for a developed soul,--all these remote and
difficult questions lead us on. And yet the search for human origins, or
the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is
but a groping in the dark.

We turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records; but we soon discover,
that, though containing a picture, unequalled for simplicity and
dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they
are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but
belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of _Time_
is not at all directly treated in them.

We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a
most ancient civilization,--the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile: we
search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal
records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand
relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the
embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a
date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before
us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the
childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have