[112] Edkins, "China's Place in Philology."
[113] Reginald S. Poole has adduced very ingenious arguments, monumental, astronomical, and mythological, for the date B.C. 2717.
[114] It is curious that almost simultaneously with the appearance of Bunsen's scheme a similiar view was attempted to be maintained on geological grounds. In a series of borings in the delta of the Nile, undertaken by Mr. Horner, there was found a piece of pottery at a depth which appeared to indicate an antiquity of 13,371 years. But the basis of the calculation is the rate of deposit (3-1/2 inches per century) calculated for the ground around the statue of Rameses II. at Memphis, dated at 1361 B.C.; and Mr. Sharpe has objected that no mud could have been deposited around that statue from its erection until the destruction of Memphis, perhaps 800 years B.C. Farther, we have to take into account the natural or artificial changes of the river's bed, which in this very place is said to have been diverted from its course by Menes, and which near Cairo is now nearly a mile from its former site. The liability to error and fraud in boring operations is also very well known. It has farther been suggested that the deep cracks which form in the soil of Egypt, and the sinking of wells in ancient times, are other probable causes of error; and it is stated that pieces of burnt brick, which was not in use in Egypt until the Roman times, have been found at even greater depths than the pottery referred to by Mr. Horner. This discovery, at first sight so startling, and vouched for by a geologist of unquestioned honor and ability, is thus open to the same doubts with the Guadaloupe skeletons, the human bones in ossiferous caverns, and that found in the mud of the Mississippi; all of which have, on examination, proved of no value as proofs of the geological antiquity of man.
[115] 5004 B.C.
[116] Perhaps the earliest certain date in Egyptian history is that of Thothmes III. of the eighteenth dynasty, ascertained by Birch on astronomical evidence as about 1445 B.C. (about 1600, Manetho); and it seems nearly certain that before the eighteenth dynasty, of which this king was the fifth sovereign, there was no settled general government over all Egypt.
[117] The Egyptians seem, like our modern cattle-breeders, to have taken pride in the initiation and preservation of varieties. Their sacred bull, Apis, was required to represent one of the varieties of the ox; and one can scarcely avoid believing that some of their deified ancestors must have earned their celebrity as tamers or breeders of animals. At a later period, the experiments of Jacob with Laban's flock furnish a curious instance of attempts to induce variation.
[118] See for evidence of these views early notices in Genesis, and Lenormant and Osburne on Egyptian Monuments and History.
[119] There is no good reason to believe the flint implements mentioned by Delanoüe and others, as found on the banks of the Nile, to be older than the historic period.
[120] Wilson, "Prehistoric Man," 2d edition, p. 68.
[121] Southall has accumulated a great number of these facts in his book on the antiquity of man.