were impossible to sail up the stream of ancient history without inquiring for the site of Egypt, and saluting it with veneration and respect. It is equally impossible to determine its position without ascending the pinnacle of time, and investigating the primitive epochs of the human race.

This must be done, indeed, for higher purposes than merely that of establishing a system of universal chronology, and solving the questions immediately connected with that subject. If history teach any lesson, and convey to us any instruction, we must suppose progress and development. Man, in his toilsome passage through the dark periods of history, must follow out some eternal law, and that, indeed, not an external one, but one peculiar to itself, of an internal and intelligible character. If history be not merely an endless unmeaning repetition of the same phenomena, and its unity a dream and empty sound, its epochs, when rightly understood, will represent the different stages of one grand and general development. It is only upon such an assumption that man can be said to have an internal life out of time and independent of time, by virtue of the powers of his mind, and his efforts to realise its brightest conceptions. This is true, not of individuals merely, but in a still more remarkable degree of the masses also. Various attempts have been made by philosophers and historians to ascertain the laws of this development. It were foreign to the character of an historical work to inquire whether these can be understood by the highest effort of speculation, as the necessary consequences of the nature of the Divine Essence. We cannot, however, entirely pass by such questions as these whether we may not obtain a clearer knowledge of the sphere of human development when the horizon of history is so considerably extended by our Egyptian

researches? and whether by observations on that portion of the curve already measured, which is far from insignificant, we cannot determine the nature of the whole? and if the nature, why not the laws of this line of development of the human mind in universal history?

But, to however wide an extent chronological researches may be pushed, the solution of the problem proposed, the discovery of the position of Egypt in general history, or at least the attempt to discover it, is in reality still unaccomplished. The main object of history, indeed, would be but little advanced by such researches, if they only furnished us with the genealogy of the Egyptians, or even of mankind. The history of a nation, if it deserve the name, is a thing of too high moment to be used as the instrument for ennobling a genealogical register. Still less can the study of general history be a mere genealogical investigation. Even the unity and affinity of race among great nations is either the external manifestation of internal unity and internal connexion, or it is really of no more essential importance than the classification of animal and vegetable productions according to the countries which gave them birth. It is, therefore, indispensably necessary for the investigator of general history to establish this internal unity as an historical fact; whether it be within the scope of human intellect, or not, to prove that it is the necessary consequence of the operation of demonstrable laws.

The result, then, of the first portion of our inquiry is to raise its character and purport much higher than was apparent at the outset. But while the value of the object to be attained is considerably enhanced, the difficulties also, it must be admitted, are very considerably magnified. A second important problem still remains to be solved after the end of our chronological researches has been effected, that of bringing the Egyptian

dates into harmony with the corresponding synchronisms in general history. The second portion of this work will be dedicated to an attempt at solving this problem, and the latter sections of the present volume will serve as introductory to that attempt.

In order to give a slight sketch of the nature of the proposed problem, we proceed to consider the views respecting the origin of the human race to which allusion has been already made.

The result of our chronological investigation has been to carry us up to the foundation of an empire of Egypt, and to a series of Kings whose names have not only been registered and transmitted to us by the Egyptians themselves, but which are now legible on Egyptian monuments, most of them erected in the lifetime of the Kings whose names they record. Now, there must necessarily have been a period, comprising the infancy of the nation, anterior to the existence of this empire and the chronological registration of its Kings; and as the adjustment of Egyptian chronology carries us very much nearer than has been hitherto supposed possible to the first dawning of national history, so, in like manner, the examination of the germs of Egyptian history may, perhaps, do more than any other study towards the elucidation of the primitive history

of man.

Upon a closer survey of these earliest germs of Egyptian existence, we shall see at once that they comprise two totally distinct periods. That immediately before us does not differ materially from the preceding. In the one we have a chronology which implies a connected definition of time: in the other, unconnected facts, fragments of historical tradition, very frequently mixed up together by ancient poetry or modern fable. But, under any circumstances, we find at this immediately

preceding epoch a nation possessed of language and religion, and undoubtedly also of written characters; the germs, therefore, of that national life which we meet with in the chronological epoch. Those germs contain, indeed, an incipient element of progression, although much still remains to be developed. The germs of national existence, however, which we find in Egypt, are not the most ancient traces of humanity. No historical investigator will consider the Egyptians as the most ancient nation of the earth, even before he has called to his assistance the science of the philologer and mythologist. Their very history shows them to belong to the great middle ages of mankind. If, therefore, there were no further knowledge to be acquired of the origin of man than is furnished by the earliest commencement of Egyptian life, we should gain from it but little new and valuable information; we should have toiled on in vain through dark and undefinable ages, and found ourselves at last just as far off as ever from the object of our researches — an acquaintance with the origin of the human race.

The Egyptian patriarchs, perhaps, were descended from a cognate race, which sprang, in like manner, from another of kindred origin. It will, however, be generally admitted, on a little consideration, that the world must once have been differently constituted, before national bodies, possessing language and religious systems, could appear on the stage of history. For even those who believe that language and religion were not human inventions, but, like Prometheus' fire, given to man from Heaven, cannot but admit, without rejecting all the evidence of research, that they were not communicated in a state of completeness. The reverse is indeed obvious, viz. that man has never received more than the germ, which he has been left to mould and modify according to his own will and capabilities. Modern

philology, more especially, proves that the various conformations have been gradually worked out upon the principles of an internal law. The period, then, at which this occurred, may with propriety be termed the period of the Origines. I believe this to be a strictly historical era: at all events it alone can rightly be termed primeval, as contradistinguished from history generally so called. Properly speaking, then, what we call universal history is simply a record of Man in modern times; or, should there be a history of the Origines, the more modern history of our species. In the latter case, the so-called national Origines are evidently nothing more than the transition from ancient to modern history.

We have intimated that the necessary consequence of the adjustment of Egyptian chronology has been to extend materially the field of history which is chronologically definable. We have stated that there are internal and external grounds for believing that the period which can be chronologically computed was preceded by one, and that of no very brief duration, which bids defiance to chronological definition. There is however another era, preceding that which we have divided into chronological and unchronological; it is still historical, belonging therefore to time and space, though wholly different from the later period. It is the period in which national bodies were forming their language and mythology. It seems, indeed, that this portion of history must have struck its roots very deep into the soil of time, inasmuch as it is now six or seven thousand years since it produced in the valley of the Nile (the slow formation of the deposit of that river) a mighty tree the germ of which is not indigenous in that country.

In prosecuting this inquiry, success will consequently depend upon whether we can offer an exposition of the