It is in this respect only, viz. the introduction of the horse, that we can discern any foreign importation calculated to materially affect the native civilization of Egypt, during the immensely long period of its existence. It had no doubt a great deal to do with launching Egypt on a career of foreign wars and conquests under the eighteenth dynasty, and so bringing it into closer contact with other nations, and subjecting it to the vicissitudes of alternate triumphs and disasters, now carrying the Egyptian arms to the Euphrates and Tigris, and now bringing Assyrian and Persian conquerors to Thebes and Memphis. But in the older ages of the First and Middle Empire, the ox, the ass, the sheep, ducks and geese, and the dog, seem to have been the principal domestic animals. Gazelles also were tamed and fed in herds during the Old Empire, and the cat was domesticated from an African species during the Middle Empire. Agriculture was conducted both in Egypt and Chaldæa much as it is in China at the present day, by a very perfect system of irrigation depending on embankments and canals, and by a sort of garden cultivation enabling a large population to live in a limited area. The people also, both in Egypt and Chaldæa, seem to have been singularly like the modern Chinese, patient industrious, submissive to authority, unwarlike, practical, and prosaic. Everything, therefore, conspires to prove that an enormous time must have elapsed before the dawn of history 7000 years ago, to convert the aborigines who left their rude stone implements in the sands and gravels of these localities, into the civilized and populous communities which we find existing there long before the reigns of Menes and of Sargon. CHAPTER VI. PREHISTORIC TRADITIONS. Short Duration of Tradition--No Recollection of Stone Age--Celts taken for Thunderbolts--Stone Age in Egypt--Palæolithic Implements--Earliest Egyptian Traditions--Extinct Animals forgotten--Their Bones attributed to Giants--Chinese and American Traditions--Traditions of Origin of Man--Philosophical Myths--Cruder Myths from Stones, Trees, and Animals--Totems--Recent Events soon forgotten--Autochthonous Nations--Wide Diffusion of Prehistoric Myths--The Deluge--Importance of, as Test of Inspiration--More Definite than Legend of Creation--What the Account of the Deluge in Genesis really says--Date--Extent--Duration--All Life destroyed except Pairs preserved in the Ark--Such a Deluge impossible--Contradicted by Physical Science--By Geology--By Zoology--By Ethnology--By History--How Deluge Myths arise--Local Floods--Sea Shells on Mountains--Solar Myths--Deluge of Hasisadra--Noah's Deluge copied from it--Revised in a Monotheistic Sense at a comparatively Late Period--Conclusion--National View of Inspiration.