What a mysterious and subtile pleasure there is in groping back through the early twilight of human history!  The mind thirsts and longs so to know the Beginning:  who and what manner of men those were who laid the first foundations of all that is now upon the earth:  of what intellectual power, of what degree of civilization, of what race and country.  We wonder how the fathers of mankind lived, what habitations they dwelt in, what instruments or tools they employed, what crops they tilled, what garments they wore.  We catch eagerly at any traces that may remain of their faiths and beliefs and superstitions; and we fancy, as we gain a clearer insight into them, that we are approaching more nearly to the mysterious Source of all life in the soul.  The germ, to our limited comprehension, seems nearer the Creator than the perfected growth.  Then the great problem of Origin forever attracts us on,—­the multitudinous and intricate questions relating to “the ordained becoming of beings”:  how the Creating Power has worked, whether through an almost endless chain of gradual and advantageous changes, or by some sudden and miraculous ictus, placing at once a completed body on the earth, as an abode and instrument for a developed soul,—­all these remote and difficult questions lead us on.  And yet the search for human origins, or the earliest historic and scientific evidences of man on the earth, is but a groping in the dark.

We turn to the Hebrew and the inspired records; but we soon discover, that, though containing a picture, unequalled for simplicity and dignity, of the earliest experiences of the present family of man, they are by no means a monument or relic of the most remote period, but belong to a comparatively modern date, and that the question of Time is not at all directly treated in them.

We visit the region where poetry and myth and tradition have placed a most ancient civilization,—­the Black-Land, or Land of the Nile:  we search its royal sepulchres, its manifold history written in funereal records, in kingly genealogies, in inscriptions, and in the thousand relics preserved of domestic life, whether in picture, sculpture, or the embalmed remains of the dead; and we find ourselves thrown back to a date far beyond any received date of history, and still we have before us a ripened civilization, an art which could not belong to the childhood of a race, a language which (so far as we can judge) must have needed centuries for its development, and the divisions of human races, whose formation from the original pair our philosophy teaches us must have required immense and unknown spaces of time,—­all as distinct as they are at the present day.