EMBRACING THE CONSIDERATION OF VARIOUS INQUIRIES RELATIVE TO THE BIBL ANTEDILUVIAN AND EARLIER POSTDILUVIAN PERIODS, WITH DISCUSSIONS OF SEVERAL OF THE LEADING QUESTIONS BY THE REV. J. MUNSON OLMSTEAD, M. A., AUTHOR OF THOUGHTS AND COUNSELS FOR THE IMPENITENT,' · OUR FIRST MOTHER,' ETC. GLASGOW: 1854. PREFACE. THE difficulties connected with the writing of the following work were so fully anticipated by the author, that not until some time after a demand in this day for one of the kind was, in conversation with some literary and Christian friends, insisted on, and himself warmly urged to undertake it, could he obtain his own consent to engage in the effort. No contemporaneous historic pen had left aught concerning the period to be surveyed-a period of almost a thousand years, and lying back near the beginning of time-commencing with the year of the world 1056, and extending to 2006; and the sum of what the pen of inspiration had afterward recorded, was comprised within the compass of a few short chapters. A large portion too of the subjects soliciting investigation were intrinsically difficult to be handled. If, in the great absence of historic detail, it might be thought that the investigations and discoveries of modern science could yield important aids -as indeed justly it might-yet the writer could not but be aware that even those aids would not be rendered available without a large measure of labour and research. He had previously written a work bearing on a proximate prior period, and therefore, it might be said, was experimentally aware of the obstacles to be met with in the composition of such a work. The consideration that to a large number of minds the field lay in a territory almost utterly unknown, and, as respects |