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: faculty for keeping the genealogical records pretty straight, and it is safe to presume they knew what they were about. PART II (Extracts from Mr. Roosevelt's address): " The first civilizations which left behind them clear records rose in that hoary historic past which geologically is part of the immediate present?and which is but a spans length from the present, even when compared only with the length of time that man has lived on this planet. These first civilizations were those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago. Compared with the civilization with which we are best acquainted the striking features in the Mesopotamian and the Nilotic civilizations were the length of time they endured and their comparative changelessness. The kings, priests, and people who dwelt by the Nile or Euphrates are found thinking much the same thoughts, doing much the same deeds, leaving at least very similar records, while time passes in tens of centuries." The period referred to by Mr. Roosevelt as " the first civilizations which left behind them clear records" " those which rose in Mesopotamia and the Nile valley some six or eight thousand years ago, is the one which followed the Deluge and began with the descendants of Shem, Ham and Japhet; and the civilizations were those founded by the Egyptians in the Nile valley and the Chaldean on the Euphrates and the Assyrian in the region known as Mesopotamia. Of the several the Egyptian was considered by the ancients, Herodotus, the Greek (B.C. 450) and Manetho the Egyptian (B. C. 250) as the oldest, and based upon their historical data our modern scholars and historians make their calculations, which however differ widely. To quote from " Ridpath's Universal History " the " system of Lepsius ...