“Will not the historian deign to notice the prior origin of every art and science in Egypt a thousand years before the Pelasgians studded the isles and capes of the Archipelago with their forts and temples,—long before Etruscan civilization had smiled on Italian skies? And shall not the ethnographer, versed in Egyptian lore, proclaim the fact that the physiological, craniological, capillary, and cuticular distinctions of the human race existed on the distribution of mankind throughout the earth?
“Philologists, astronomers, chemists, painters, architects, physicians must return to Egypt to learn the origin of language and writing; of the calendar and solar motion; of the art of cutting granite with a copper chisel and giving elasticity to a copper sword; of making glass with the variegated hues of the rainbow; of moving single blocks of polished sienite 900 tons in weight for any distance by land and water; of building arches, round and pointed, with masonic precision unsurpassed at the present day, and antecedent, by 2000 years, to the “Cloaca Magna” of Rome; of sculpturing a Doric column 1000 years before the Dorians are known in history; of fresco painting in imperishable colors; and of practical knowledge in anatomy.
“Every craftsman can behold in Egyptian monuments the progress of his art 4000 years ago; and, whether it be a wheelwright building a chariot, a shoemaker drawing his twine, a leather-cutter using the selfsame form of a knife of old as is considered the best form now, a weaver throwing the same hand-shuttle, a whitesmith using that identical form of blowpipe but lately recognized to be the most efficient, the seal-engraver cutting in hieroglyphics such names as Shooph’s above 4300 years ago, or even the poulterer removing the pip from geese, all these and many more astounding evidences of Egyptian priority now require but a glance at the plates of Rosellini.”
Perhaps the post-office, being a more modern invention, the result of man’s progress, and its use essential to his present wants and governmental requirements, claims more originality than many of those inventions which a ruder state of society devised. And yet even here we actually owe to those ages much of the material which makes up our great postal superstructure. We learned from them how messengers, couriers, and the transmitting of letters formed an important part of their social system, and how it ultimately grew into a political one, under kings and emperors, through all subsequent ages.
PASTORAL LIFE.
“Nothing great, nothing useful, nothing high and ennobling, nothing worthy of man’s nature, of his lofty origin and ultimate exalted destiny has ever been accomplished but by toil; by diligent and well-directed effort, by the busy hand guided in its effort by the wise, thoughtful, hard-working brain.”—Anon.
When God said, “Let there be light: and there was light,” it was not the mere flash of the brightness of heaven over the earth, but a light that was to be as lasting as creation itself.
Every thing that sprung up from the earth in its order and beauty received the spirit of a new life from this holy and divine light. And when man in the image of his Maker stood in the Garden of Eden, there shone around him another light,—an emanation from God himself. Mind—intellect—power!
Man was the pioneer of the science of government. Deity planned it, and, as the crowning work of his creation, said:—
“Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”