against the injuries of the air, and
of slaughtering each other. Let us judge by the Germans and by the
English in Caesar's time, by the Tartars to-day, by the two-thirds of
Africa, and by all the peoples we have found in America, excepting in
some respects the kingdoms of Peru and of Mexico, and the republic of
Tlascala. Let us remember that in the whole of this new world nobody
knew how to read or write.

The second record is the central eclipse of the sun, calculated in China
two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years before our era, and
recognized true by our astronomers. Of the Chinese the same thing must
be said as of the peoples of Babylon; they already comprised a vast
civilized empire without a doubt. But what puts the Chinese above all
the peoples of the earth is that neither their laws, nor their customs,
nor the language spoken among them by their lettered mandarins has
changed for about four thousand years. Nevertheless, this nation and the
nation of India, the most ancient of all those that exist to-day, which
possess the vastest and the most beautiful country, which invented
almost all the arts before we had learned any of them, have always been
omitted right to our days in all so-called universal histories. And when
a Spaniard and a Frenchman took a census of the nations, neither one nor
the other failed to call his country the first monarchy in the world,
and his king the greatest king in the world, flattering himself that his
king would give him a pension as soon as he had read his book.

The third record, very inferior to the two others, exists in the Arundel
marbles: the chronicle of Athens is graved there two hundred and
sixty-three years before our era; but it goes back only to Cecrops,
thirteen hundred and nineteen years beyond the time when it was
engraved. In the history of antiquity those are the sole incontestable
epochs that we have.

Let us give serious attention to these marbles brought back from Greece
by Lord Arundel. Their chronicle begins fifteen hundred and eighty-two
years before our era. That is to-day (1771) an antiquity of 3,353 years,
and you do not see there a single fact touching on the miraculous, on
the prodigious. It is the same with the Olympiads; it is not there that
one should say _Graecia mendax_, lying Greece. The Greeks knew very well
how to distinguish between history and fable, between real facts and the
tales of Herodotus: just as in their serious affairs their