Playfair's excellent paper, in the second volume of the Edinburgh Philosophical Transactions. The Hindoo religious books contain, besides, a great many of the ideas afterwards adopted by the Jews. The long lives of antedeluvians, in particular, are the exact copy of the Iogues of the Indians. The Dwapaar Iogue, the latter part of which answers to the period of Noah, was when men's lives were limited to a thousand years; and Methuselah we know did not live so long. They have, too, their mythological deluge, or the incarnation of Vishnu into a fish. For an account of which I refer my readers to Volney, and to Mr. Maurice himself. The former gentleman is a good judge of ancient literature; he pretends that he can prove, that most of the chapters of Genesis, supposed to contain names of persons, are mythological: the posterity of Noah is, according to Volney, no more than a geography of the world as known to the Jews. I have not read Mr. Volney's memoir which I understand he has published on this subject; but, when I consider the late period when Genesis and the other books were composed, and how much the Jews borrowed from the Egyptians and Babylonians, how much the deluge of Noah and his ark resemble the emblems of Osiris; in short, when I reflect on the unintelligibility and apparent absurdity of Genesis, on the impossibility of the Deluge, and of the not less absurdity of the population of the world so soon after that calamity, I confess I am much inclined to despise the whole performance. There have been various suppositions upon the meaning of the names mentioned in Genesis. Adam has been said to signify, in many parts of Asia, the first day of the week; and Enoch, the seventh successor of Adam, to be the same with Saturn, or the seventh day. Thus Assur, Elam, Lud, Madai, Javan, and Tiras, which are said to be the founders of the Assyrians, the Elamites, the Lydians, the Medes, the Ionians, and the Thracians, may very probably be nothing else than the enunciation of the names of these countries; for, between Assur and Assyria, or Lud and Lydia, there is not a very great difference. We know that Egypt is by the Arabs called _Masr_, which has the same consonants with the Hebrew _Misraim_, whose plural termination implies properly the inhabitants of Egypt. In the Bible, _Misraim_ is called the founder of that kingdom. We also know, that Syria is called _Barr-el-sham_, or the country to the left. The inhabitants of Thebaid are called the sons of Cush. Again, we find several names of towns very much resembling those of the supposed founders of these monarchies; Sur, or Tyre, is not unlike Assur. These are conjectures; I pretend to found nothing upon them; but, at least, they are probable. Your Genesis, on the contrary, as it is commonly explained, contains palpable lies. It supposes a deluge, which neither did nor could take place; it destroys the human race, when we know that nations were then in existence. Lastly, it talks of the founders of