Ethnological and philological essays Author:James Kennedy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: QUESTION THE SUPPOSED LOST TRIBES OF ISRAEL. In tracing the history of knowledge, it is astonishing to observe how many questions have been and continue to... more » be generally accepted as indubitable truths, which reason and authority show to be groundless errors. On every side we find such errors prevailing; always much to be deplored as impeding the course of learning, but most so when from any cause they become mixed up with considerations entitled to our reverence, which appear to invest them with the same sacred character. To dispel such errors, or to establish a non-recognized truth, may be justly pronounced the most worthy tasks to be undertaken by those who aspire to become the advancers of general instruction. But this great object seems to be lost sight of by the larger portion of modern writers, who are too apt to be only constantly reproducing the lucubrations of their predecessors, or at best to be only stringing together a,.number of truisms, or it may be even of facts, without ever realizing a new idea, or deducing from them an original conclusion. Thus it is that we find so many fallacies prevailing, which being handed down from one writer to another, are accepted without examination and entertained without any doubt of their trustworthiness, notwithstanding they have in reality no foundation whatever for the theories formed respecting them. In the history of the creation given us in the sacred Scrip- tures, because the word in the Hebrew, DTS has unfortunately been translated ' day' in our version, instead of by some term equivalent to ' age' or ' period/ the generality of readers have become imbued with an almost ineradicable impression that the statements of the Mosaic history are contradictory to the discoveries of modern science. Though the same word is c...« less