Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/68

 religion may have to a divine authority, that claim cannot be extended to its theology, which is nothing else but a system of reasoning upon two sets of data, namely, those furnished by the religion itself, and those furnished by the science of the day. Biblical chronology as understood by Usher, Petavius or other learned men, depends not upon the Bible only, but also upon the data of profane chronology as understood in their days, and the latter chronology was built in great part upon statements of Greek and Latin writers which at the present day are known to be absolutely worthless.

Egyptian Ethnology.

The boring instruments which had to be employed at great depths in the operations of which I have been speaking, necessarily brought up everything in fragments. There is therefore no proof that the Egyptians known to us from history were descended from the pre-historic men whose existence was first brought to light by these operations. But the very proximate probability of such a descent might have suggested itself to ethnologists, who have persisted in looking for the ancestors of the Egyptians among races the very existence of which cannot be traced very far back. At all events, the view is now entirely abandoned according to which the Egyptians came down the Nile from