EXPLANATORY.

"THE NATURAL GENESIS" contains the second half of " A Book OF THE BEGINNINGS," and completes the author's contribution to the new order of thought that has been inaugurated in our own era by the writings of Darwin and Wallace, Spencer and Huxley,' Morgan and McLennan, Tylor and Lubbock. It was written by an Evolutionist for Evolutionists, and is intended to trace the Natural Origines and teach the doctrine of development. The total work is based upon the new matter supplied by the ancient monuments, ranging from the revelations of the bone-caves and the records of the Stone Age to the latest discoveries of hieroglyphic inscriptions, the cuneiform tablets, and the still extant language of gesture-signs. The work is not only one of original research, it is emphatically aboriginal, and the battle for evolution has here been continued amongst the difficult defiles and mountain fastnesses of the enemy.

After reading the first two volumes, Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace expressed the fear lest there might not be a score of people in England who were prepared by their previous education to understand the book. Few of its reviewers could be included amongst that number; and some of them were as remote from the writer and his meaning as the apes from man, gibbering across the chasm of the missing link. But the author's mode of treatment, which was deficient in the art of bridge-building, and the exigencies of publishing according to a plan that (so to speak) caused the Exodus to precede the Genesis, may have been unfortunate.

Much of the matter is pre-eval, so that the method could not be historical; nor could it be chronological, because of the links missing in series and sequence. The method is typological; and these two volumes of "Typology" are necessary to the proper understanding of the previous ones, which were written with the matter of these in

mind. In the preceding part of the work the author took very extended views of Egypt's enormous past and the age of her premonumental mythology. Some of the conclusions set forth therein were characterized by Dr. Samuel Birch as interesting and ingenious. But at that time these suggestions and conclusions were announced in direct opposition to the accepted authorities. Since then, however, the inscriptions discovered at Sakkarah have come to corroborate the present writer. They contain allusions to Sirius the Dog-star, which show that at least two Sothiac cycles of 1,460 years each had been observed and registered previous to their time-even if they are not copies of indefinitely older documents—which carries the chronology back to some 9,000 or 10,000 years from the present day. Various myths, hitherto supposed to have been the growth of later centuries or of Asiatic origin, including the most important of all, that of SutHorus, were then extant and of immemorial antiquity. In this case it is but just to say that "A BOOK OF THE BEGINNINGS" happened to be the farthest advanced upon the right road.

The German Egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann, who reviewed the "BOOK OF THE BEGINNINGS," was startled at the many "unheard-of suggestions" which it contained, and thought the work was "inspired by an unrestrained thirst for discovery," but he adduced no evidence whatever to rebut the conclusions, and gave no hint of the author's being wrong in his derivation of facts from the monuments upon which those conclusions in a great measure depend. The writer has taken the precaution all through of getting his fundamental facts in Egyptology verified by one of the foremost of living authorities, Dr. Samuel Birch, to whom he returns his heartiest acknowledgments. He also sincerely thanks Captain R. F. Burton and Mr. George St. Clair, F.G.S., for their helpful hints and for the time and labour they have kindly given during the progress of this work. As a matter of course, the author will have blundered in manifold details. Discoveries are not to be made without mistakes, especially by those who do not cultivate the language of non-committal. But up to the present time I have not been shown nor do I perceive any reason for doubting the truth of my generalization that Africa and not Asia was the birthplace of articulate man, and therefore the primordial home of all things human; and that the race which first ranged out over the world, including the islands of the north and the lands of the southern seas, was directly Kamite; the Blacks of Britain (who left the

flattened tibia, the negroid pelvis, the Australoid molars, and gorilla-like skulls in our bone-caves) and the Blacks of Australia being two extreme wings extended from the same African centre. Professor Huxley recognizes in the native Egyptian the most refined form of the same anthropological type that survives at a far lower stage in the Australian black. My further contention is that both issued from Inner Africa as the human birthplace, and that Egypt itself is old enough to be the mouthpiece of the first articulate language, the oldest intelligible witness to the natural genesis of ideas, and the sole adequate interpreter of the primary types of thought.

Professor Huxley has asserted that the Iberian (or African) blood: remains in Britain even though "all traces of language may have been obliterated." But all traces of a language can never be obliterated. We hear of a Pictish language disappearing along with a lost race and only leaving a word or two on the surface. That is impossible. The Cornish race and Cornish words live on after a particular dialect has ceased to be spoken. The structure of language changes, dialects dislimn and transform, but words do not pass away; the oldest are preserved in our dialects. Neither Kymraig, Gaelic, nor Irish Keltic is spoken in Dorsetshire, yet "Rimbury" remains with its place of urn-burial to prove that it was so named as the "Roimh," a burying-ground, the meaning of which is repeated in the Bury.

The present writer has been charged with being "sublimely unconscious that words have a history;" but he knew that certain words were also prehistoric, that they are older than languages, and that words, like myths, customs, laws, or beliefs, do not always begin where we may first meet with them. The prehistoric is everywhere the dominating difficulty with which we have to deal. It is said that you can do anything with words, but the illustrations chiefly relied on by the present writer were precisely those words and names which the current etymology could do nothing with, neither account for nor affiliate them. These proved to be Egyptian, and that pointed to an extension of their history, or of ours. Moreover, it was found that the Kamite typology offered a principle of naming which determines the primary nature and significance of words. This the writer applied to the type-names of places, waters, hills, and caves in Britain. The result is to show that the most ancient names and words are Kamite, not Aryan nor Semite.

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That is they are words still extant in Africa, which can be brought out of that land together with the black race, but cannot be got into it backwards from Europe or Asia, America or Australia. For example, it was suggested that the name of Deruthy, the place of the bone-cave, at the junction of the two rivers Gave, was identical with the Egyptian Teru, for the river-branch. But the writer did not then know that the name was applied in Egypt at Teruta, the land (ta) of the river-branch, which is the name of an Egyptian town situated on the Nile at the junction of the Bahr-el-Yussuf.1 Here the type is the Tree, whence the branch, and this is the Teru in Egyptian and numerous other African languages. Again, in the earliest known mention of the Cimbri, Philemon the poet says they called the Northern Sea, from their own country as far as Cape Rubeas, the Morimarusa or Dead Sea.2 This has been compared with Mor-marwth in Welsh for the Sea of Death. But in Egyptian Mori is the sea, Meru means the dead, and Sa denotes the hinder part, the back, behind, i.e. the Kamite North. Thus read, Mori-maru-sa would signify the Dead Sea North. Such type-words-and I have adduced hundreds-are equal to archaic coins for comparative purposes, and these prehistoric words, which are not derived from language in Asia, bear the stamp and superscription of Egypt. Hence my claim that the recognized non-Aryan (or pre-Aryan) residuum constituted the African origines.

It has now been amply shown in these volumes that certain rootwords run through all language, and thus point back to a unity of origin which has to be sought for in the most primitive conditions.

The main thesis of my work includes the Kamite origin of the pre-Aryan matter extant in language and mythology found in the British Isles, the origin of the Hebrew and Christian theology in the mythology of Egypt,—the unity of origin for all mythology, as demonstrated by a world-wide comparison of the great primary types, and the Kamite origin of that unity,—the common origin of the mythical Genitrix and her brood of seven elementary forces, found in Egypt, Akkad, India, Britain, and New Zealand, who became kronotypes in their secondary, and spirits or gods in their final psychotheistic phase,—the Egyptian genesis of the chief celestial signs, zodiacal and extra-zodiacal,-the origin of all mythology 1 Champollion, L'Égypte sous les Pharaons, tom. i. pp. 297, 298. 2 Pliny, Hist. Nat. iv. 16.