The latter at length said, hesitatingly:
"The ideas you have suggested are to me, I confess, utterly novel.
During my time I never knew any one to entertain so singular a fancy
as that the universe (or this world if you will have it so) ever had a
beginning at all. I remember once, and once only, hearing something
remotely hinted, by a man of many speculations, concerning the
origin of the human race; and by this individual, the very word Adam
(or Red Earth), which you make use of, was employed. He employed it,
however, in a generical sense, with reference to the spontaneous
germination from rank soil (just as a thousand of the lower genera
of creatures are germinated)- the spontaneous germination, I say, of
five vast hordes of men, simultaneously upspringing in five distinct
and nearly equal divisions of the globe."
Here, in general, the company shrugged their shoulders, and one or
two of us touched our foreheads with a very significant air. Mr.
Silk Buckingham, first glancing slightly at the occiput and then at
the sinciput of Allamistakeo, spoke as follows:
"The long duration of human life in your time, together with the
occasional practice of passing it, as you have explained, in
installments, must have had, indeed, a strong tendency to the
general development and conglomeration of knowledge. I presume,
therefore, that we are to attribute the marked inferiority of the
old Egyptians in all particulars of science, when compared with the
moderns, and more especially with the Yankees, altogether to the
superior solidity of the Egyptian skull.
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