The _primal man_, we know, was created pure and innocent, free from liability to pain, and possessed of unmixed capacity for the enjoyment of the pleasures that surrounded him; glowing with health, and with every emotion redolent of new delight. At sight of him, Each hill gave sign of gratulation, Joyous the birds; fresh gales and gentle airs Whisper’d it to the woods; and from their wings Flung rose, flung odours from the spicy shrub:— Apprehension of the miseries to which his progeny were doomed, would have marred this happiness; hence his ignorance of evil, and his belief that the felicity he enjoyed would be as permanent as it was perfect. But our business is with man in his _actual_ condition; the sport of “All maladies Of ghastly spasm, or racking torture, qualms Of heart-sick agony, all feverous kinds, Convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, Intestine stone, and ulcer, colic pangs, Demoniac phrensy, moping melancholy, And moon-struck madness, pining atrophy, Marasmus and wide wasting pestilence, Dropsies and asthmas, and joint-racking rheums, And over them triumphant Death his dart Shook, but delayed to strike.”—— Undertaking to examine the subject _ab initio_, we must take into account the sources of our information, and as our knowledge of every event _antecedent to the discovery of writing_ must have been transmitted by oral or traditional agencies, we have to settle, in some degree, how far such evidence is worthy of credence. According to popular belief, the Noahic flood destroyed the whole human race, with the exception of Noah and his family; who were therefore the sole depositories of the traditions of the events which had occurred between the time of Adam and themselves. The great longevity of these antediluvian fathers made this oral transmission easy; and we know, that the sons of Noah lived to see the birth of Abraham, whom, as the founder of circumcision, we claim as the first operative surgeon on record. In dealing with dates, I adopt the commonly accepted chronology, unmoved by those refined speculations so much in favour at this time. I begin with Moses, for whatever evidence may be urged upon us in the shape of marbles, or monuments, claiming an antiquity anterior to the advent of the Jewish lawgiver, it is a positive and unimpeachable fact, that no _writings_ are in existence, which in point of age reach within many centuries of the Pentateuch; indeed, as we shall presently see, the oldest of the Greek writers are, in comparison with Moses, but as the children of yesterday. The five books of Moses were written 1500 years before Christ. Hesiod, the father of Greek literature, flourished 500 years later; and Homer, the next in succession, nearly a century after Hesiod.