begins: "The Sibyl says." This only means that the source of it is a patchwork of some Alexandrian or other Hellenistic Jew. 103

The fragment proceeds, after the above, as follows:

Of the building of the Tower.

"When men still spoke but one language, they built a very high tower, in order to go up to heaven. The Almighty (in Syncellus, the Gods) however sent a strong wind, and threw down the tower. After that, men spoke different tongues; from which circumstance the place was called Babylon." (Babel = confusion.)

It is quite clear that had the old tradition contained anything of the kind, Berosus would not have failed to mention it in his historical work; and it is equally clear that Polyhistor and Eusebius would not have allowed such a treasure to be lost.

According to Hippolytus (Hæres. v. 7. p. 97.), the Chaldeans called the man who was born of the earth, but who afterwards became a living soul, Adam. Nothing can be more natural; but if it be asked whether this was the name of the first man in their traditions, we must venture to doubt it. Would Berosus not have stated so? Eusebius undoubtedly would not have passed over without notice so marked a resemblance to the Bi

103 I would here express a wish that that acute, ingenious, and learned scholar, Jacob Bernays, would analyze the whole of this Sibylline tradition, as he has lately pointed out the Jewish element in Phokylides. To a man of such vast energy it would not interfere with the great work he has in hand, a History of Philology, a beautiful specimen of which is given in his monograph on Scaliger. It is most gratifying to me to learn from my friends in London and Paris, that a work written by one to whom, on account of his being a Jew, a Professorship is refused in Germany, has been very favourably received in England (at Oxford he was honoured with the proposal of editing Lucretius, to be printed by the Clarendon press) as well as in France.

ble narrative. The whole story in Hippolytus is connected with the Gnostic God Adamas, which, although interpreted as a Greek word, may be suspected of being derived from a Jewish or post-Christian source.

But the whole Chaldee account of the Flood terminates in local Babylonian reminiscences. We see that the efforts of the sacerdotal authors to have it supposed that their sacred books were written before the Flood were precisely the same as those of the genealogist of the house of Montmorency to make the world believe that the ancestor of that family deposited his pedigree in Noah's hands when he went into the ark.

But the general contrast between the Biblical and Chaldee version is very great. What a purely special local character, legendary and fabulous, without ideas, does it display in every point which it does not hold in common with the Hebrew!

We now proceed to make an historical analysis of this most sacred of all traditions about the beginnings of the human race, that of Genesis.

We must in the mean time bear the following steadily in view:

1. The antediluvian epochs of the Babylonian traditions are essentially different from the Biblical. These latter, from Kain-Kenan downwards, are of an historical nature, real fragments of the oldest traditions of our race, landmarks in a vast sea, which, like the Irish lake, conceals lost cities beneath its waters.

2. The Babylonian traditions of the nine, or three, antediluvian epochs are of the same kind as the dynasties of Egyptian Gods. In both cases the historical portions may be reminiscences of vast natural convulsions and of the destructive effects of fire and water, from which mankind with great difficulty, and after great loss, contrived to extricate itself.

3. But neither the Babylonian nor the Egyptian traditions, in the shape in which they have come down to

us, rest upon primeval data, the common property of the old races. The one set have been fabricated according to the type of Chaldee life, in the race of Aram; the other in the valley of the Nile. The groundwork of them both may originally have been Asiatic, but the Egyptians know nothing of a Flood.

THE POINT OF VIEW OF SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH ABOUT THE BOOK OF GENESIS.

We now come to the most solemn, and in many respects the most remunerating, though at the same time the most difficult portion of our historical comparison. What is the relation between the traditions in Genesis about the origin of Man and the facts presented to us by the language and mythology of Egypt and primitive Asia? To evade answering the question will be the more impossible from an historical point of view, inasmuch as we may perhaps have obtained from our previous inquiries new elements for the solution of these very Biblical difficulties. They have taught

us this at all events, that the intellectual element which originated at the close of the old world with Abraham, the spiritual founder of the new world, was derived from an early Semitic source. The result of our researches also is, that Moses developed his intellectual worship out of Semitic nature and history, and did not, as has been believed, borrow the ideas or symbols of Kham. It has taught us on the other hand, that the nature-worship and astral symbolism of Egypt and primitive Asia were by no means the earliest mythological views entertained by the pre-Abrahamitic world. That mythology was the rank product of the

mind when it became absorbed in the symbolism of original ideas, rites, and myths about intellectual things, that is, such as do not belong to time and space. This intellectual basis was obviously not a later substruction, but the historical root out of which symbolism grew according to the eternal laws of development. They are the same laws by the operation of which primitive Christianity was converted into Latin medievalism, by a pathological process. Even here our assertion is verified, that Egyptian civilisation represents the Middle Age of the old world.

Modern history begins with Menes and Abraham, but the natural root from which he and his race sprang is older even than the origines of Egypt. Kham is the medieval deposit of a later state of consciousness than that which Abraham reduced to its simplest form.

The belief held by all Christian people, that the Bible gives us a faithful account of the first beginnings of the world and of mankind, is in reality truer than the theories hitherto adopted about the Bible narratives would justify the critic in assuming. The consequence of the Jewish and medieval notions is such as in an age of philosophy and research it must have been: unbelief, opposed to superstition. A mere belief upon authority, which is not based on reason and consequently cannot exercise much influence on the intellect, and an acquiescence in misinterpreted tradition, generate first childish superstition, which destroys the childlike truth of belief, and then a negative killing unbelief, whether candidly avowed, or concealed beneath the mask of hypocrisy.

The task which European science has now to perform, is to bring that tradition within the pale of history, i.e. to deal with it conscientiously and honestly, and to analyse it for the purpose of discovering what is the truth which is to be gleaned from it. The assistance to be derived from Egypt in this work of restoration is not less than