A Book of the Beginnings

Abstract

IN two large volumes Mr. Gerald Massey has collected together all the principal facts known about Egypt, with a view to trace the origin of mankind. Some portions of his theories are undoubtedly correct, especially those which go to prove that the Egyptians are the oldest known historical race, that they are an African people of a peculiar type, and by no means an Asiatic tribe filtered through the Isthmus of Suez, and in course of time building up a Semitic population in Africa; that evidence of their primitive development is to be found in their physical type; for Mr. Massey is a decided evolutionist, and regards man as evolved from some of the anthropoid apes, especially the black races, whose colour he considers marks their animal descent; that flint and stone weapons, principally of the Neolithic period, have been found in Egypt at different points is undoubted; and that the aboriginal inhabitants of the Nile Valley gradually rose to a higher state of civilisation, and that without a foreign predisposing them, is probably true. When however the author leaves the realms of ethnology and dashes into philology his results are startling, and his deductions so weird and transcendental that they fail to command acquiescence. It is the rash seizing of any word in any dialect which is totally inadmissible, as from such arbitrary selections any absurdity may be perpetrated.

A Book of the Beginnings.

By Gerald Massey. Two Vols. (London: Williams and Norgate, 1881.)