We can judge, moreover, of the lofty civilization reached in some {6} periods of antiquity by the historical descriptions of the ages of the Ptolemies, yet in that epoch the arts and sciences were considered to be degenerating, and the secret of a number of the former had been already lost. In the recent excavations of Mariette-Bey, at the foot of the Pyramids, statues of wood and other relics have been exhumed, which show that long before the period of the first dynasties the Egyptians had attained to a refinement and perfection which is calculated to excite the wonder of even the most ardent admirers of Grecian art. Bayard Taylor describes these statues in one of his lectures, and tells us that the beauty of the heads, ornamented with eyes of precious stones and copper eyelids, is unsurpassed. Far below the stratum of sand in which lay the remains gathered into the collections of Lepsius, Abbott, and the British Museum, were found buried the tangible proofs of the hermetic doctrine of cycles which has been already explained. Dr. Schliemann, the enthusiastic Hellenist, has recently found, in his excavations in the Troad, abundant evidences of the same gradual change from barbarism to civilization, and from civilization to barbarism again. Why then should we feel so reluctant to admit the possibility that, if the antediluvians were so much better versed than ourselves in certain sciences as to have been perfectly acquainted with important arts, which we now term _lost_, they might have equally excelled in psychological knowledge? Such a hypothesis must be considered as reasonable as any other until some countervailing evidence shall be discovered to destroy it. Every true _savant_ admits that in many respects human knowledge is yet in its infancy. Can it be that our cycle began in ages comparatively recent? _These cycles_, according to the Chaldean philosophy, _do not embrace all mankind at one and the same time_. Professor Draper partially corroborates this view by saying that the periods into which geology has “found it convenient to divide the progress of man in civilization are not abrupt epochs which hold good simultaneously for the whole human race;” giving as an instance the “wandering Indians of America,” who “are only at the present moment emerging from the stone age.” Thus more than once scientific men have unwittingly confirmed the testimony of the ancients.