Although the testimony of history is definite and decisive as to the chronology of the world, within the limits of a few hundred years, there is a general assumption, in all branches of scientific inquiry, that man must have existed many thousand years beyond the period thus assigned to him. Lyell speaks of "the vastness of time"[59] required for his development, and Bunsen, as we have seen, requires twenty thousand years, at least, between the Deluge and the nativity of our Lord: and wherefore this discrepancy? Because of a fundamental assumption--not merely hypothetical for the convenience of inquiry--but confident and absolute; an assumption which, so far as the argument is concerned, is the very matter in dispute--that man must have progressed and developed to the point at which we see him. [59] "Principles of Geology," tenth edition, 1868, ii. p. 471. At the same time, the actual chronology cannot be altogether ignored, and some cognisance must be taken of the facts which history presents to us; and it is this unfortunate exigency, interrupting the placid course of development, which not unfrequently lands scientific inquirers of the first eminence in difficulties from which it will take an indefinite lapse of time to extricate them; _ex. gra._, Bunsen, in his "Egypt," iii. 379, says-- "It has been more than once remarked, in the course of this work, that the _connection between the Chinese and the Egyptians_ belongs, in several of its phases, to the _general history_ of the world. The Chinese language is the furthest point beyond that of the formation of the Egyptian language, which represents, as compared with it, the middle ages of mankind,--viz., the Turanian and Chamitic stages of development." The conclusion of philology (_vide_ also Brace's "Ethnology," p. 114) is, therefore, that the Turanian or Chamitic grew out of the more inorganic and elementary Chinese. Now, let us compare Lyell's conclusions with Bunsen's. Lyell equally believes ("Principles of Geology," ii. 471) "that three or four thousand years is but a _minute fraction_ of the time required to bring about such wide divergence from a common parent stock, 'as between' the Negroes and Greeks and Jews, Mongols and Hindoos, represented on the Egyptian monuments." At the same time, he endorses Sir John Lubbock's view, and pronounces, upon what appears to me very light and insufficient grounds (ii. 479), that "the theory, therefore, that the savage races have been degraded from a previous state of civilisation _may be rejected_:" and by implication that the civilised races have progressed from the savage state may be affirmed.[60]