It is, perhaps, doubtful whether we shall ever be able to obtain satisfactory answers to these questions. From what we have repeatedly seen of the slowness of development of primitive man, we do not doubt but what the antiquity of Neolithic Man goes much farther back than seven thousand years. When a naturalist finds in widely separated parts of the world animals belonging to a common order, he is justified in concluding that the order is a very ancient one. To illustrate, the opossum belongs to an order of animals of which the only other representatives are found in Australia and the neighboring islands.23 We are not surprised, therefore, to learn that this order was the first to appear in geological time.24 We think the rule is equally applicable to races of men. We are told that the Turanian race, or, as it is often named, the Mongoloid race, is a very widely scattered one. Its representatives are found over the larger portion of Asia, in Northern Europe, the islands of the Pacific; and they were the only inhabitants of the New World at the time of the conquest.25 This wide dispersion would imply that they were one of the ancient races of the world, and as such their antiquity must be far greater than the above named number of years. This point grows clearer when we see what light is afforded on this subject by historical research. The Turanian people were in full possession of Europe while yet the ancestors of the Hindoos and the various European nations dwelt together as one people in Asia. As a race they had grown old when the Celts commenced their wanderings. Egypt comes before us as a powerful people, at a time at least as early as six thousand years ago. Even at that time they had attained civilization. But we need not doubt that there is a long series of years lying back of that, during which this people were slowly advancing from a previous condition of barbarism. The Egyptian people themselves are, in part at least, descendants of a Turanian people that probably in former times occupied the valley of the Nile and North Africa.26