Genealogy of the family of Forbes

IV
very generally diffused over the globe, but one oi' the very high-
est antiquit}'. The respect to family pretensions are to be found
•equally among the savages of every region as among the Euro-
pean governments ; and the very first traces of any records of
riankind give unequivocal proofs, by their anxious enumeration
.nd pedigrees, that this propensity is one of those most deeply
rooted in human nature. * From the holy histories, our atten-
don may first be arrested by the Egyptian Pyramids, those se-
.pulchral monuments, doubtless meant to eternise the families of
the founders, and whose nrasses remain equally the evidences of
human vanity, and its futility. Toinspect thesewondcrs of stupen-
dous toil has of late been a frequent satisfaction : but to come at any
further discovery has baffled every research and probable disqui-
sition J intended to perpetuate the actions and names which once
iilled the kingdoms with their glories, they impart the strongest
and liveliest conviction of the fleeting state of man and of all
3iis monuments ; and the works themselves of the labours of men ;
iliey seem destined to carry through hundreds and thousands
of ages, the mournful certainty, that those labours have been
A'ain, and that though the materials remain hardly yielding, yet,
20 time, that the memorials of the epoch of their first existence
3iave perished, and that the earliest historians were just as igno-
lant of their mysterious birth, as thirty succeeding centuries
have been, and, in every probability, will ever remain. Unlike
the general fate of ancient structures, which leav& the history of
their foundations, while age has obliterated the materials which
* Vast as the ideas of antiquity are, suggested by the Pyramids,
still tbey are so only from comparison ; when we consider the disco-
veries of the successive worlds of Cuvier, in liis " Resherches sur les
«' Ossemens fcssiles ;" his clear demonstration of deluges after deluges;
of 128 different sorts of animals in those ancient worlds, now extinct;
of the surface of the earth being formed of layer npon layer of worlds
of animals and plants of different and distant climates, destroyed and
reproduced, and that man has left no remains in aay one stratum
—what a field for reflection ; yet, to eternity, what a nothing are aU
these tests of the progress of tine !