ng a long sequence in previous
history.

As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man of fair
and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the Louvre or the
British Museum and look at the monuments of those earlier dynasties
without seeing in them the results of a development in art, science,
laws, customs, and language, which must have required a vast period
before the time of Mena. And this conclusion is forced upon us all the
more invincibly when we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier
stages of civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth
which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that earliest
civilization to this hour. To this we must add the fact that Egyptian
civilization was especially immobile: its development into castes is but
one among many evidences that it was the very opposite of a civilization
developed rapidly.

As to the length of the period before the time of Mena, there is, of
course, nothing exact. Manetho gives lists of great personages before
that first dynasty, and these extend over twenty-four thousand years.
Bunsen, one of the most learned of Christian scholars, declares that
not less than ten thousand years were necessary for the development of
civilization up to the point where we find it in Mena's time. No one can
claim precision for either of these statements, but they are valuable
as showing the impression of vast antiquity made upon the most competent
judges by the careful study of those remains: no unbiased judge can
doubt that an immensely long period of years must have been required for
the development of civilization up to the state in which we there find
it.

The investigations in the bed of the Nile confirm these views. That some
unwarranted conclusions have at times been announced is true; but the
fact remains that again and again rude pottery and other evidences of
early stages of civilization have been found in borings at places so
distant from each other, and at depths so great, that for such a range
of concurring facts, considered in connection with the rate of earthy
deposit by the Nile, there is no adequate explanation save the existence
of man in that valley thousands on thousands of years before the longest
time admitted by our sacred chronologists.

Nor have these investigations been of a careless character. Between
the years 1851 and 1854, Mr. Horner, an extremely cautious English
geologist, sank nine