Adamites and Preadamites Author:Alexander Winchell 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: a color which the old Hebrew would have called "red," I feel myself very ignorant of the meaning of terms. Anthropologically, color possesses less significanc... more »e than the meaning of the term Adam. It is confessedly one of the less constant characteristics of race. But the strict interpretation of Scripture is very often insisted on, and in this case I would like to pin the strict constructionists to their chosen method ; because the strict construction, as will be shown, is the one which corresponds with the entire range of facts. CHAPTER IV. THE NEGRO PREADAMIC. In the attempt to ascertain whether the biblical Adam was the progenitor of all mankind, or only of the White and Dusky races, I pointed out the fact that literal interpretation renders the name Adam inapplicable to races whose complexion displays no noticeable tinge of "red." But in the attempt to make Adam the father of the Black races, I find myself beset by other and graver difficulties. The Adam of Genesis is supposed to date from an epoch less than two thousand years before Noah. There have been almost six thousand years for the posterity of Adam to attain their present amount of divergence, as exemplified in different families and races of man. This has not perceptibly increased since the Christian era. I suppose all will admit, on the evidence of history and monuments, that the Semitic, Hamitic and Aryan features were not perceptibly less marked two thousand years ago than at present. If any one doubts this, he can be easily satisfied by turning over the pages of any work illustrated from the monuments of Egypt and Assyria. (For accessible American digests, see Nott and Gliddon's Types of Mankind and Indigenous Races of the Earth.) Better, let him visit the Assyrian and Egyptian departments of the Louvre...« less