Not that five or six thousand years was a short allowance for
this; but because some of our familiar domesticated varieties of
grain, of fowls, and of other animals, were pictured and mummified by
the old Egyptians more than half that number of years ago, if not
much earlier. Indeed, perhaps the strongest argument for the original
plurality of human species was drawn from the identification of some
of the present races of men upon these early historical monuments and
records.
But this very extension of the current chronology, if we may rely
upon the archaeologists, removes the difficulty by opening up a longer
vista. So does the discovery in Europe of remains and implements of
pre-historic races of men to whom the use of metals was unknown,--men
of the _stone age_, as the Scandinavian archaeologists designate them.
And now, "axes and knives of flint, evidently wrought by human skill,
are found in beds of the drift at Amiens, (also in other places, both
in France and England,) associated with the bones of extinct species
of animals." These implements, indeed, were noticed twenty years ago;
at a place in Suffolk they have been exhumed from time to time for
more than a century; but the full confirmation, the recognition of
the age of the deposit in which the implements occur, their
abundance, and the appreciation of their bearings upon most
interesting questions, belong to the present time.
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