appeared to some writers to demand a still greater extension of time. The Jesuit missionaries in China were so strongly impressed with the proofs of high antiquity evinced in the records of that people, that they applied to the pope for a dispensation to adopt the Septuagint chronology [which allows about 700 years longer] instead of that of the Vulgate, and even confessed that this would not be sufficiently consistent with the antiquity they felt obliged to assign to the Chinese history. The Jesuit Mailla enters most into detail on the subject, especially as connected with their early inventions in the arts. Other writers have dwelt upon the various remains indicating a spread of population and a degree of civilisation,—at periods too early to be consistent with any received chronology,—among the Egyptians, Mexicans, Hindoos, and other nations, and the probability of many of those arts of which they exhibit traces, having been originally derived from a still more ancient, and widely-spread, and highly civilized people in Central Asia. Some interesting remarks on this subject will be found in a Paper "On the History of Magnetical Discovery," by T. S. Davies, Esq., F.R.S., inserted in the British Annual for 1827, p. 264. This able writer argues much from the unequal progress made in civilization and the arts of life under different conditions of national existence, and contends that in the earliest stages that progress must have been incalculably slow, and that the chronology, consequently, must be almost indefinitely enlarged."[1]
In view, now, of these facts and considerations, what course does it become the liberal-minded theo-
- ↑ Kitto's Biblical Cyclæpedia, article "Deluge".
