On The Antiquity of Intellectual Man: From a Practical and Astronomical Point of View

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The mode of inquiry adopted there, produced, within the limits of errors of measurement, such satisfactory answers touching the mental ideas and intentions of the long-departed designer and builders of that ancient structure,-that a desire was naturally felt to try how far the same principle could be carried, as a general method of investigation, wherever any remains of very high antiquity still exist.

From many such attempts, during twelve months past, the materials have been obtained for the present essay upon the Antiquity of Intellectual Man. An essay of no very great length, and admitting doubtless of much future improvement as well as extension, but based on a more direct series of solid, trustworthy, and contemporary ancient facts, than have ever yet been utilized on a regular system for this special purpose; viz, to approximate towards real human history, whatever that may have been, at the most distant periods of time.

As those epochs embrace dates at upwards of 1000 and even 2000 years before the birth of all school science; i.e., before man began, either amongst the priests of Egypt or the poets and philosophers of Greece, to endeavor to acquire a knowledge of nature by his own observations and measures,-they inevitably belong to those very early ages of the world, concerning which it is asserted just now, in too many quarters, that the Sacred Scripture says one thing, and modern science the very opposite.

At this particular stage then, in the progress of education and learning, and when the old arguments on either side of the controversy appear to have been abundantly displayed, a new method of investigating some of the same questions has appeared, and is employed in the following pagea method sufficiently scientific, because based chiefly on practical astronomy; and abundantly direct, because dealing only with the very contemporary remains of the times actually concerned.

What this method therefore says, within such limits as it has the opportunity of testifying,- not only cannot be insignificant to any man now living, but will probably be found to throw a new and explanatory light upon several passages in Genesis, usually considered as serious difficulties.

The author would have had far less confidence in submitting the results of his labours in so rich and considerable a field, to the public thus soon, --but that, while two items of these labours have had the misfortune to excite personal feelings which he sincerely regrets, and even to entail a vindictive opposition carried on before the Royal Society of Edinburgh and elsewhere during the past winter, there has resulted thence a most signal advantage to a new theory;-viz., that of being speedily and thoroughly tested by the able heads and very unsparing hands, of, as they say themselves, many opposing mathematicians, arithmeticians, doctors, and engineers, both military and civil; and every assailable point, even down to an unimportant printing error, has, it may be hoped and expected, been discovered ere this, and made the most of.

So material has the author considered these involuntary co-operations with him in his pages, correcting his language, and freeing his calculations from stray errors, that he has labored everywhere to give to such critiques almost as full space and representation as to his own views of the same cases. Where the objectors have gloried, and still glory, in their remarks, and have printed them publicly, considering them apparently as triumphant representations of their side of the question,-the author has not hesitated to attach their names to their writings, and this whether he agreed or whether he disagreed with them; but where the critics have been more doubtful about the correctness of their opinions, -and he has himself been able subsequently to prove them in error, he has kept back the name, but employed inverted commas on the words used, in order to indicate that such opinions are actually floating about in society at present.

**Contents and Sample Pages**