n Egyptian history, Menes,
changes the channel of the river Nile, makes a great reservoir, and erects
the Temple of Phthah at Memphis. His son Athothis is known as the builder
of the Memphite Palace, and as a physician, who wrote books on anatomy.
The pyramid times are early in Egyptian history; the portrayed scenes in
the tombs of this early period reveal the same habits which existed in
after times. That writing had been long in use is demonstrated by the
hieroglyphics in the Great Pyramid. Go as far back as you may in Egyptian
history, you will find no primitive barbarous mode of life. Sir Charles
Lyell admitted, in "Antiquity of Man," p. 90, that "we have no distinct
_geological evidence_ that the appearance of what are called the inferior
races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the
higher races."

George Rawlinson says Mr. Pengelly made a similar confession at the
meeting of the British Association at Bristol, in August, 1875. So far as
this question of evolution is concerned, it is just as easy to establish
involution of civilization into barbarism as evolution of civilization out
of barbarism. Herodotus gives an account of the Geloni, a Greek people,
who were driven from the cities on the northern coast of the Euxine, and
retiring into the interior, lived in wooden huts, and used a language half
Scythian and half Greek. We follow this people down to the times of Mala
and find them fully barbarous, using the skins of those slain in battle as
coverings both for themselves and their horses. The Copts, of our times,
are degraded descendants of the ancient Egyptians. In North and South
America the descendants of the Spanish conquerers are poor representatives
of those Castilians who, under Pizarro and Cortez mastered the Peruvian
and Mexican kingdoms, and planted the civilization of the old world in the
new. Civilization is liable to decay, to wane, to deteriorate, to sink so
low that it may be a question whether it is any longer civilization. In
the cases we have alluded to we have a low degradation retaining evidences
of something higher. In comparative philology we have cases where it is
presumed by the best of critics that a higher state of civilization sank
to the lowest conceivable state of heathenism. The race existing in
Ceylon, known as the "Weddas," is of this type. The language of the Weddas
is regarded as a base descendant of the most complete and first known form
of Aryan speech