Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/77

Rh in the name of the Chaldæans, disputes their literary priority with the Canaanites on the most futile subjects; thorough and engrossing national vanity throws an insipid air over the whole work. I am willing to admit that this disease is a very old one in the world; but it betrays itself, with artlessness, in truly ancient works; while here it is absurdly paraded, as in Sanchoniathon and other writings of this intermediate age, when the East was brought into contact with Greece. “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture” thus appears to me to be imbued with all the blemishes which afflicted the human intellect towards the third and fourth centuries: charlatanism, astrology, sorcery, and a taste for the apocryphal. It is very far removed from Greek science of the period of Alexander, so free from all superstition, so fixed in method, so infinitely beyond all those idle chimeras which afterwards led astray and retarded the scientific progress of the mind for nearly sixteen centuries.