[29] Anniversary Address to the Zoological Society, 1830. CHAPTER II. ABORIGINAL TRACES. Though we are assured, and cannot doubt, that man was created an intelligent being, capable of enjoying the high faculties with which he alone of all the denizens of earth was endowed, we have no reason to assume that he had any conception of the practical arts by which we are enabled to satisfy wants of which he was equally unconscious. We know on the same authority that there existed a period in the history of our race, ere Zillah, the wife of Lamech, had borne to him Tubal-cain, "the instructor of every artificer in brass and iron," when men tilled the ground, pursued the chase, made garments of its spoils, and constructed tents to dwell in, without any knowledge of the working in metals, on which the simplest of all our known arts depend. Through such a stage of primitive arts most, perhaps all, nations have passed. We detect evidences of it among the Egyptians, old as the date of their civilisation appears, in the stone knives of the embalmers, still frequently found in the catacombs. By such only could the incision be made in the side of the dead, through which to extract the intestines; and when they had been cleansed and replaced, the eye of Osiris, the judge of the dead, was placed as a mysterious seal over the sacred incision. The feeling in which such a custom originated, arising from the veneration which appears to be universally attached to whatever is ancient, is easily understood. While the knife of bronze or iron was freely employed for all ordinary purposes, the primitive stone implement was retained unchanged for the sacred incision in the dead. So also, probably from a like idea directly borrowed from the Egyptians, the stone or flint knife appears to have been used by the early Hebrews in circumcision. Zipporah, Moses' wife, took a sharp stone, or stone knife, and cut off the foreskin of her son. The like was done when Joshua renewed the same rite at Gilgal in the east border of Jericho; while a still more remarkable community of feeling with the veneration of the ancient Egyptians for the otherwise obsolete implement of stone, is discernible in its retention by the priests of Montezuma as the instrument of human sacrifice.