Egypt had no Chou-King, but her monuments are the most magnificent of books. Champollion has taught us how to read them, and we can decipher them page by page. Now Lepsius and Bunsen place the fifth dynasty about the fortieth century, and according to Mariette Bey, the lists of Manetho, upon the subject of which the eminent Egyptologist makes formal reserves, go back to the year 5004 before our era. We should, then, be separated from the earliest historical times of Egypt by an interval of about seventy centuries. If, instead of counting by years, we count by the human life, which we will estimate at about twenty-five years, we find that we are only separated from these times, which constitute the extreme limit of past history, by 280 generations. These numbers are undoubtedly interesting. They tend to modify some of the impressions which we have received in our childhood; but they tell us nothing of the antiquity of the human race. At most, in showing us that at this period there existed people in the valley of the Nile sufficiently civilised to possess the art of writing, and to raise monuments worthy of our admiration, they refer the first appearance of man far beyond the limits which they reach themselves. III. The Egyptians themselves have, then, a past anterior to all history. With much greater reason is this the case with the Chinese, Hindoos, Greeks, and still more so with nations less well endowed, or accidentally retarded in their evolution. To plunge into this obscurity with the hope of finding in it any certain land-marks, and to discover facts of which even legends say nothing, would thirty years ago have appeared a senseless enterprise. It is, nevertheless, the work accomplished by one of the most recent of sciences, _Prehistoric Archæology_. We should therefore regard the year 1847 as a memorable date, when three Danish savants, a geologist, a zoologist, and an archæologist, were charged by the Society of Northern Antiquaries to carry out the studies which have served as its foundation. By a study of the Kitchenmiddens and peat-mosses of their country, Forchammer, Steenstrup and Worsaar have done for the history of man what De Buch, Elie de Beaumont, and Cuvier have done for the history of the globe. The _Kitchenmiddens_ are essentially formed by the accumulation of shells strewn on the sea-shore, which sometimes attain considerable proportions. With the shells are found the remains of fish, and bones of birds and mammalia. Man alone could have formed this accumulation, and his presence, moreover, is revealed by the implements, tools, and weapons, which he once mislaid, and which are now found among the remains of his meals. They consist of stone, almost always rudely shaped. In some of these artificial hills, among the traces of a very rudimentary industry, we meet with other stone objects which betray workmanship of the most remarkable perfection.