Page:An Essay on the Age and Antiquity of the Book of Nabathaean Agriculture.djvu/90

74 cover of the formularies of a worn out science, inundate the world with idle fancies, and contribute, in a deplorable manner, to the abasement and perversion of the human intellect.

One deduction appears to me to arise from the analysis to which we have subjected “The Book of Nabathæan Agriculture,” and the other Nabathæan writings, and that is that the School to which they belong, taken altogether, cannot be anterior to the third or fourth century of our era; and that the literary movement which they suggest as earlier, does not allow us to place it before Alexander. I am far from insisting that the work of Kúthámí could not have preserved to us many most ancient fragments, remodelled in the course of time in all sorts of way. It may be that the art which it teaches in its procedure can be traced back to the most ancient epochs of