CHAPTER II.

Man as a Pyrrhonist.

WHETHER man originally sprung from what is familiarly termed, "his Mother Earth," or from a more ancient ancestry, viz., from "nothing," is immaterial. Indisputably he is a great fact, which may be safely left to speak for itself. As, however, the weight of evidence is decidedly in favour of the latter, confirmed as it is by the well-known shake of Lord Burghley's head, and "there's nothing in it," the progress of science in the present day naturally claims for man a far higher anti

quity than the Jewish records are disposed to allow.

Moses, the oldest historian whose writings have come down to us, with the exception of some fragments of Hermes Trismegistus, and "the Proverbs of Aphobis,"* only allows him a period of about 6000 years for his sojourn below. As, however, this is confidently assumed to be too short a period for the requirements of science, we venture to suggest a solution of this difficult problem by which true philosophy and the Divine oracles may be brought into harmony with each other. It is well known that the most distinguished Pyrrhonists of the present day have some diffi

*From a papyrus of M. Prisse d'Avennes, translated in part by M. Chabas, and wholly by the Rev. D. Heath. As "the Proverbs" appear to have been written about the time of Joseph's death, they may be dated more than a century before the Exode. The fragments of Hermes Trismegistus are about six centuries older still.

+As Pyrrhonism has not yet become a conventional term, it is due to our unscientific readers to explain its meaning. Pyrrho was a distinguished Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C., whose great principle was to believe nothing and to doubt everything. He bore the same relative proportion in

culty in deciding upon the exact time when the human race parted with their tails. Our last chapter clearly proved that once men had them, and in these degenerate days, with some rare exceptions, as in the case of a renowned demagogue from the Emerald Isle whose tail was said to have consisted of forty joints (some malignants used to say thieves instead), it is certain they have them not.

We may lawfully suppose, then, that Adam was the first of the human race who appeared in the world without the caudal appendage. And in order to make " vitty," as the provincials in the West of England are accustomed to term it, the theory propounded by certain great Biblical critics in the present day, who affirm that Adam had tailless contemporaries, we

an intellectual sense to Pythagoras and Plato, which the Seven Sages of England (so well known as the famous authors of "Essays and Reviews") and Bishop Colenso bear to Bacon and Newton. Lord Chancellor Eldon is perhaps the only great man of modern times, who combined in his own person both Pyrrhonism and its antithesis. He was celebrated for his doubts," yet he commences his private diary with the notable remark,-" I was born, I believe !"

throw out a hint without attempting any proof, which scarcely appears necessary in these days, that possibly some of the huge gorilla tribe, who are described by Moses under the term of giants,"* may have lived through the transition period. These by intermarriage with the genuine sons of Adam may have combined to produce the great race of philosophers, the Monboddos, the Darwins, the Bunsens, the Huxleys, &c., &c., which have become so illustrious in our own times.

It is said that an ancient French race, of the true blue blood, boasts of being able to trace its lineage higher than the flood, as one of their household traditions reports, when Noah was entering the ark, that he was politely

* "There were giants in the earth in those days" Gen. vi. 4. We have heard of a Scotch lady of the Grant clan, who used to prove her lineage from those ancients, owing to an error in the press, the letter "r" being introduced in place of "i." Hence the passage in her Bible read there were grants in the earth in those days." This somewhat resembles the comical error made on Burke's famous aphorism, “Virtue is not confined to climates or degrees," which appeared in the printed report as "Virtue is not confined to climaxes or trees!"

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requested to preserve the archives of the Montmorenci family. And there is the wellknown anecdote of the Welsh squire, who displayed his pedigree to James I., on which was discovered in the middle of his ancestral tree a note asserting that Adam was supposed to have lived about that time. This latter story affords not only inferential proof of the higher antiquity of the Welsh* over the French, but also conclusive proof against the limited age assigned by Moses to the human race.

The most distinguished Pyrrhonist of the nineteenth century, the great German Baron Bunsen, of whom it has been so happily said by one of England's seven sages, that "if Protestant Europe is to escape those shadows of the twelfth century which with ominous recurrence are closing round us, to him will

* The Welsh are proverbial for their love of the antique. We knew a Welshman who fondly affirmed that Noah's ark was built in Wales. We never heard of his adducing any evidence in behalf of his theory, but on the principles of modern Pyrrhonism, as their doubts seem to be confined only to any statement in Scripture, this of course was unnecessary.