B. Edwards, the Egyptologist, who has recently lectured in our Pennsylvania University course, thinks ten thousand years not too high an estimate. In support of ibis hypothesis, the great antiquity of man, which no scholar now disputes, carries us back many thousands of years beyond Menes, and there are many facts which favor the assumption that the valley of the Nile was one of the places inhabited for an indefinite period. The works of art—monuments, architecture, paintings, etc.—show an antiquity that cannot be estimated. Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who wrote a history of Egypt, by request of Ptolemy II., two hundred and eighty-six years before Christ, carries us back more than seven thousand years. The Pentateuch is a compilation by several authors, and hence its patchwork character. Professors Ewald and Kuenen and others have proved this, and Dean Stanley, of the English Establishment, has admitted it. Some portions may have been compiled eight hundred or nine hundred years before Christ, but not the two contradictory accounts of the creation and fall of man. The Assyrian cuneiform tablets, which were discovered in 1873 and 1874 a. d., and which are now in the British Museum, show that this ancient people had this story about two thousand years before the time of Moses. The Jews learned it in Babylon, and none of the other Old-Testament writings contain any notice of it, because it was not known until after the return of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, five hundred and eighteen years before Christ. Is it not reasonable to suppose that the various Old-Testament writers would have made some reference to the Pentateuch had they known of its existence? Professor François Lenormant of the National Library of France, a most learned archaeologist and palaeontologist, and a most devout Christian, in his _Beginnings of History_ admits that the Jews borrowed substantially the story of the creation and the fall from more ancient nations, and furnishes the original copies. The legends recorded in Genesis are found among many ancient peoples who lived many centuries before Moses; and Berosus, a priest of the temple of Belus, who wrote two hundred and seventy-six years before Christ, affirms that fragments of Chaldean history can be traced back 15 Sadi or 150,000 years. I have mentioned these things because they are germane to what is to follow.