PREFACE
conscientious scholar. It seems necessary therefore to say that in setting down things which are absurd on their faces the writer has not always thought it necessary to say that they seemed absurd to him e.g. he does not really believe that Adam actually wrote any of the books ascribed to him.
Again a failure to make clear in the previous volumes that the references to secondary sources were not references to these as authorities but as secondary led a few to the impression that these represented the writer's own sources. It may therefore be explained that most of the researches underlying these essays have been conducted according to the strictest canons of modern method as to sources. Even translations were, and are here, for the most part, used as guides not authorities, although in a plentiful lack of exact knowledge of the Egyptian and Babylonian languages, little attempt has been
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