Lyell demands a separate and careful examination; we here merely content ourselves with remarking that the _very_ great antiquity of man—that which would compel us to believe that he existed for some almost immeasurable period in the condition of the savage—rests hitherto on unsatisfactory grounds. The ethnologist who believes, as Mr Wilson does, in the unity of the human race, requires a long period of time for the development of those varieties which had become permanent prior to the epoch of the building of the Egyptian Pyramids. Mr Wilson takes what he requires, but does not, as matters stand at present, contest for more. To those who, on the grounds of the sacred text, would dispute his right to even this modest inroad upon the illimitable Past, he answers,—that the chronology popularly supposed to be that of the Bible is in fact the chronology only of certain learned interpreters, and that there is nothing in the sacred text to exclude the supposition that a much longer interval may have passed than is generally supposed between the creation of Adam and, let us say, the appearance of Abraham. Interpreting the Noachian Deluge as partial—as not, in the literal sense of the term, universal—he finds scope enough within the limits of the sacred text for that slow and gradual development of civilised man which his archæology has taught him to believe in. Nor does he find any difficulty whatever in reconciling this slow progress from the savage to the civilised man with what is recorded of the creation of Adam, or the attributes of our first parents. Their superior excellence, he considers, consisted in their perfect morality, in the predominance of the benevolent affections, and in that reason which is one with self-knowledge: it could not have consisted, he argues, in knowledge of the arts and sciences; certainly not in the knowledge of arts quite needless in the warmth, abundance, and security of the garden of Paradise. When, therefore, their descendants, deprived of this high moral excellence, found themselves scattered abroad upon the earth, what could they, in fact, have become but ignorant savages? They would have to evolve from their own natural sagacity those arts of life which their new relation to the external world rendered necessary. They would have to commence that long and toilsome ascent to civilisation which the speculative historian has so often attempted to describe.