Pre-Historic Nations - Or Inquiries Concerning Some of the Great Peoples and Civilizatins of Antiquity, and Their Probable Relation to a Still Older Civilization of the Ethiopians or Cushites of Arabia #224222

We nowhere find a continued and permanent advance ment of any nation or community of these races, but we see a constant progress of civilization from lower toward higher degrees, from the few to the many, and from limited and special toward many-sided and all-embracing develop ment. Nations rise, flourish, and sink again to obscurity. The Egypt of to-day is not that Egypt which we see in the monuments of its Old Monarchy; Chaldea is not now the ancient Chaldea which'we study in its ruins; to-day we inquire in vain on the coast of Asia Minor for that Ionian confederacy whose marvelous culture, passing over intodisappeared, this old civilization has remained; sometimes checked and lowered for a succession of ages, but always reappearing with new developments of its forces and new forms. The Reverend Dr. Lang, in his View of the Origin and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation, is led by the sub ject to make this observation: In Tuscany and in Egypt, in India and in China, and, I will add, even in the South Sea Islands and in both Americas, we behold the evidences of a primitive civilization, which, in some instances, had run its course anterior to the age of Homer, but which, at all events, acknowledged no obligation to the wisdom or refinement of the Greeks. Few will question the fact he states, so far as relates to Italy and Asia, although not many who carefully study the past will describe all that civilization as primitive. Dr. Lang himself is not quite satisfied with this description; for, in attempting to ex plain the origin of the ancient civilization which had near ly run its course in different countries previous to the time of Homer, he adopts the notion of Bailly and others, that it was originated by the antediluvians, and brought through the Deluge to their successors by the family of Noah. Ivithout fully exploring it, he saw a fact that was much too large for his chronology — a fact for which there was not sufficient room in the past, as be measured it.