It will be observed that while archæological evidence tends to illustrate and corroborate that wonderful collection of early historical documents contained in the Book of Genesis, and to prove their great antiquity, on the other hand these documents prove to be the most precious sources of information as to the antediluvian age, the great Flood, the earliest dispersion of men, the old Nimrodic empire, the connections of Asiatic and African civilisation, and other matters connected with the origins of the oldest nations, respecting which we have little other written history.
We thus learn that, relatively to Bible history, there is no prehistoric age, since it carries us back beyond the Deluge to the origin of man, so that we might properly restrict this term in its narrower signification to those parts of the world not covered by this primitive history. It is true that a tide of criticism hostile to the integrity of Genesis has been rising for some years; but it seems to beat vainly against a solid rock, and the ebb has now evidently set in. The battle of historical and linguistic criticism may indeed rage for a time over the history and date of the Mosaic law, but in so far as Genesis is concerned it has been practically decided by scientific exploration.
Since writing the preceding pages I have met with a remarkable paper by Mr. Horatio Hale in the _Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada_.[88] It is one which should commend itself to the study of every Biblical scholar and archæologist; but is contained in a periodical which perhaps meets the eyes of few of them. In this paper he maintains the importance of language as a ground of anthropological classification, and then uses his wide knowledge of the languages of American aborigines, and other rude races, to show that the grammatical complexity and logical perfection of these languages implies a high intellectual capacity in their original framers, and that where such complex and perfect languages are spoken by very rude tribes like the Australian aborigines, they originated with cultivated and intellectual peoples--in the case of the Australian, with the civilised primitive Dravidians of India. He thus shows that languages, like alphabets, have undergone a process of degradation, so that those of modern times are less perfect exponents of thought than those which preceded them, and that primitive man in his earliest state must have been endowed with as high intellectual powers as any of his descendants.