Note 304 — Chapter IV

“When speaking in a former work of the distinct races of mankind, I remarked that if all the leading varieties of the human family sprang originally from a single pair (a doctrine to which then, as now, I could see no valid objection), a much greater lapse of time was required for the slow and gradual formation of such races as the Caucasian, Mongolian, and Negro, than was embraced in any of the popular systems of chronology.”—Sir Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, p. 385. Dr. J. P. Thompson says: “For such works [alluding to Babel] and especially for founding such an empire as was ancient Egypt, there was need of centuries for the growth of a population in numbers and resources, equal to the gigantic structures that crown the banks of the Nile. The less than two centuries between Archbishop Usher’s date of the cessation of the flood, and Piazzi Smith’s calculation of the date of the great pyramid, was far too short an interval for results upon a scale so magnificent. * * * Either then we must place the flood much farther back upon the chronological scale, or must admit not only that it was not universal in territorial extent, which is altogether probable, but that it was not universal in the destruction of mankind, which would seem to contradict both the letter and the spirit of the sacred record.”—Man in Genesis and Geology, p. 100. New York, 1870. 12mo.