Page:Essays ethnological and linguistic.djvu/176

 QUESTION OF THE SUPPOSED LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL.

READ BEFORE

THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION, AT LIVERPOOL,

SEPT. 26, 1854.

TO WHICH ARE ADDED

TWO APPENDICES,

I. — ON THE SIX DAYS OF THE CREATION.

II. — ON THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE WORLD.

In tracing the history of knowledge, it is astonishing to observe how many questions have been and continue to be generally accepted as indubitable truths, which reason and authority show to be groundless errors. On every side we find such errors prevailing; always much to be deplored as impeding the course of learning, but most so when from any cause they become mixed up with considerations entitled to our reverence, which appear to invest them with the same sacred character. To dispel such errors, or to establish a non-recognized truth, may be justly pronounced the most worthy tasks to be undertaken by those who aspire to become the advancers of general instruction. But this great object seems to be lost sight of by the larger portion of modern writers, who are too apt to be only constantly reproducing the lucubrations of their predecessors, or at best to be only stringing together a number of truisms, or it may be even of facts, without ever realizing a new idea, or deducing from them an original conclusion. Thus it is that we find so many fallacies prevailing, which being handed down from one writer to another, are accepted without examination and repeated without any doubt of their trustworthiness, notwithstanding that there is in reality no foundation whatever for the theories formed respecting them.