And let us pause a moment just here to say, that the process of investigation and of reasoning by which we arrive at the above conclusion, and at other conclusions heretofore announced, is very near to certainty, nor is it at all mystical. As Professor Huxley very aptly says, when writing of the results of induction and deduction, "The vast results obtained by science are won by no mystical faculties, by no mental processes, other than those which are practised by every one of us in the humblest and meanest walks of life. A detective policeman discovers a burglar from the marks made by his shoe, by a mental process identical with that by which Cuvier restored the extinct animals of Montmartre from fragments of their bones. Nor does that process of induction and deduction by which a lady, finding a stain of a particular kind upon her dress, concludes that somebody has upset the inkstand thereon, differ in any way from that by which Adams and Leverrier discovered a new planet. The man of science, in fact, simply uses with scrupulous exactness the methods which we all habitually and at every moment use carelessly." Though our present treatise is on history rather than on science, we have used the facts which have fallen in our way from a somewhat extensive reading and study of history with as much "scrupulous exactness" as though we had been writing upon science, and we feel within our own breast that the conclusions reached are very near, if not a dead, certainty. We did not make the facts that we have used. They have been parts of current history from time to time, extending through a period of nearly three thousand years. We have simply put the facts in logical form--in the form of proposition and proof--and then drawn therefrom such inferences as seemed natural and inevitable. Politicians will say, we know, that our conclusions are the result of preconceived opinions; bigots in religion will say that our conclusions are founded upon prejudice; but neither the one nor the other will be true. Take the same facts, and we defy any logician or rhetorician in the world to reach different conclusions, if honest with his own conscience before God. [Illustration: 0345] CHAPTER XXII. THE CONCLUSION OF THE WHOLE MATTER.