Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/89

Rh Can one see in it anything but a plagiarism from the atomist theories of the Greeks? Or, must it be admitted that the materialist cosmogonies of the East and of Greece had their rise in Babylon? Surely here, we are permitted to hesitate. But I do not think, that any enlightened reader would entertain any doubts as to the age and character of the scholars referred to, after perusing pages 265 to 268 of Dr. Chwolson’s memoir. In seeing them boldly give rules for the formation at will of plants and animals, affirm manifest impossibilities; in following the relation of one of them, Ankebúthá, of the manner by which he had succeeded in forming a man, and kept him alive for a year; in reading the story of another who maintains that he, too, had succeeded in the same experiment, but that the king, for political reasons, had forbidden him to repeat it;—one is tempted, I imagine, to class them, not among the ancient founders of real science, but among those more modern charlatans, who under 4