higher still, birch, alder, hazel, and beech. | thousand square feet, was six inches thick, and Now we know that in the days of the lay at a depth of ten feet. In it were found Romans the Danish islands were covered fragments of unvarnished pottery, and a pair of with beech. How much previous time tweezers in bronze, indicating the bronze epoch. must we allot for the age of oak, and for sand square feet, was six or seven inches thick, The third layer, followed for thirty-five thouthe still more ancient age of fir? "The and nineteen feet deep. In it were fragments minimum of time required for the growth of rude pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, of the peat must, according to Steenstrup, and a human skeleton. M. Morlot, assuming have amounted to at least four thousand the Roman period to represent an antiquity of years," and it might have been "four from sixteen to eighteen centuries, assigns to times as great." the bronze age a date of between three thousand 2. The human relics found in the bogs in some measure correspond to these different ages of vegetation. A flint instrument has been found close to the trunk of a fir; bronze implements have been taken out of peat in which oaks abound; whilst the age of iron approaches the historic period. Antiquarians are agreed that these different metals belong to successive ages-the first two entirely pre-historic. Let us think of the lapse of time required for such a growth in the arts; for the discovery of bronze and the smelting of iron, all prior to the time of the Romans. 3. Great antiquity is implied by the shells contained in those singular refuse heaps which form ancient artificial mounds on the shores of the Danish Islands. Of these many are full grown, as in the open sea; while they are only a third of the size, if they have not ceased to exist, in the brackish waters of the Baltic. What lapse of time is implied in the physical changes which must have taken place since that imprisoned sea was open to the waters of the ocean? 4. In connection with the discovery of the ancient aquatic villages of the Swiss lakes, we must notice the lapse of time necessary to accomplish certain physical changes which have taken place since those abundant relics of man were buried in the silt. Three calculations have been made; the first by M. Morlot, with reference to the delta of the Tinière, a torrent which flows into the Lake of Geneva near Villeneuve. This delta has lately been laid open by a railway cutting, and "three layers of vegetable soil, each of which must at one time have formed the surface, have been cut through at different depths. The first of these was traced over a surface of fifteen thousand square feet, having an average thickness of five inches, and being about four feet below the present surface of the cone. upper layer belonged to the Roman period, and contained Roman tiles and a coin. The second layer, followed over a surface of twenty-five This and four thousand years, and to the oldest layer, that of the stone period, an age of from five thousand to seven thousand years. Another calculation has been made by M' Troyon to obtain the approximate date of the remains of an ancient settlement built on piles and preserved in a peat-bog at Chamblon near Yverdun, on the Lake of Neufchatel. The site of the ancient Roman town of Eburodunum, once on the borshore there now intervenes a zone of newlyders of the lake, and between which and the gained dry land, twenty-five hundred feet in breadth, shows the rate at which the bed of the lake has been filled up with river sediment in fifteen centuries. Assuming the lake to have retreated at the same rate before the Roman period, the pile-works of Chamblon, which are of the bronze period, must be at the least thirtylation we are indebted to M. Victor Gilliéron. three hundred years old. For the third calcu It relates to the age of a pile-dwelling, the mammalian bones of which are considered by M. Rütimeyer to indicate the earliest portion of the stone period of Switzerland. The piles in question occur at the Pont de Thièle between the Lakes of Bienne and Neufchatel. The old convent of St. Jean, founded seven hundred and fifty years ago, and built originally on the margin of the Lake of Bienne, is now at a considerable distance from the shore, and affords a measure of the rate of the gain of land in seven centuries and a half. Assuming that a similar rate of the conversion of water into marshy land addition of sixty centuries for the growth of the prevailed antecedently, we should require an morass intervening between the convent and the aquatic dwelling of Pont de Thiele, in all six thousand seven hundred and fifty years."Pp. 28, 29. 5. An enormous elapse of time is implied in the depth at which works of art are buried in the valley of the Nile. In an experiment begun by the Royal Society, two lines of pits and artesian borings were carried across this great valley, and "pieces of burnt brick and pottery were extracted almost every where, and from all depths, even where they sank sixty feet below the surface."-Page 36. Almost the whole of the soil is unstratified, exactly resembling inundation mud. Now the French savans have decided that inundation mud only raises the surface five inches in a century; consequently the burnt brick extricated at a depth of sixty feet must be twelve thousand years old. 6. Dr. B. Dowler states that in an excavation made in the modern delta of the Mississippi near New-Orleans, a human skeleton was found" sixteen feet from the surface, beneath four buried forests superimposed one upon the other,"—and to this skeleton he ascribes "an antiquity of fifty thousand years." 7. In a calcarious conglomerate forming part of a series of ancient coral reefs, now a portion of the Peninsula of Florida, and which is supposed by Agassiz "to be about ten thousand years old, some fossil human remains were found by Count Pourtalis." We must point out very briefly the flaws in this mass of evidence. As to No. 1 and 2,—no great lapse of time is necessary to produce two changes in forest vegetation: a single generation in a rapidly cleared country will witness one such change. Nor is a people's growth in the arts most commonly due to a long lapse of time, but rather to peaceful or warlike intercourse with more advanced races. Lyell takes no account of barter or conquest in his calculation, though he alludes to both as possible contingencies; but just so far as they are possible contingencies they vitiate his calculation. Conquest especially would serve to explain the apparent connection between a change of vegetation and a change in human implements; for an invading tribe would be very likely to destroy forests, which harbored the native inhabitants, extirpating and subjecting the other contemporaneously. As to No. 3, no great lapse of time would have been necessary to throw open the imprisoned Baltic to the ocean, in a districts which even now is rising from the sea. Lyell himself tells us that "even in the course of the present century, the salt waters have made one eruption into the Baltic by the Lymfiord. It is also affirmed that other channels were open in historical time which are now silted up."Page 14. 8. All round the coast of Scotland there are lines of shore deposits, of which the two most clearly marked are now twenty-one five and forty feet above high water. Geological and archæological evidence af ford "a strong presumption in favor of the opinion that the date of this (i. e., the lower) elevation may have been subsequent to the Roman occupation. But traces of human existence are found much higher. A rude ornament of cannel coal has been disinterred, covered with gravel containing marine shells, fifty feet above the sea-level. Now if we suppose the upward movement to have been uniform in central Scotland, and assume that as twenty-five feet indicates seventeen centuries, so fifty feet imply a lapse of twice that number, or three thousand four hundred years, we should then carry back the date of the ornament to the days of Pharaoh, and the period usually assigned to the Exodus." 9. In Sweden also an ancient hut has been discovered in beds the surface of which is now sixty feet above the Baltic: and recent shells are found in beds of clay and sand in Norway six hundred feet high. The upward movement now in progress in parts in Norway and Sweden is a well known fact. Now" if we could assume that there had been an average rise of two and a half feet in each hundred years-and such a mean rate of continuous vertical elevation, would, I conceive, be a high average-it would require 24,000 years for parts of the sea coast of Norway, where the post-tertiary marine strata occur, to attain the hight of 600 feet."-Page 58. Nor do the bones found in the Danish refuse-heaps imply antiquity far beyond the limits of history. The men were of small stature, bearing "a considerable resemblance to the modern Laplanders;" the animals were all such as are "known to have inhabited Europe within the memory of men." As to No. 5, it strikes at the root of Lyell's calculation to be told that the only datum on which it is based, that is, the decision of the French savans as to the rate of Nile mud deposition, is disputed by Mr. Horner as vague, and founded on insufficient evidence." As to No. 6 and 7, we must remember that mere assertions can not take the place of proof. Lyell is himself a high authority; and when he tells us "Dr. Dowler says," or "Agassiz says," he might just as well have said, "I say that these deposits are forty and fifty thousand years old." Such assertions are worth nothing to Lyell's readers, unless Lyell himself produces the evidence on which they are founded. So far from it, he is careful in Dr. Dowler's case to add that he "can not form an opinion as to the value of the chronological calculations." As to No. 8, the alleged antiquity of the human race in Scotland, is built on two pure assumptions. We must assume that changes which may have taken place at any time since the Roman occupation, indicate a lapse of seventeen centuries; and we must assume, that the rate of elevation has been uniform before and after that occupation; such is the only method which our imperfect knowledge will admit. Lyell does well to add, that "such estimates must be considered as tentative and conjectural;" but conjectural estimates should not be brought forward to swell the force of scientific proof. Lastly, as to No. 9, we must protest against the heedlessness (to give it no stronger name) which has associated facts that refer to the human period with others that may belong to a far more ancient era. Lyell admits that no human bones or fabricated articles have been found in the higher levels of marine deposits in Sweden; but when he adds, that the shells of these higher beds are precisely the same as those associated with rude works of art at lower levels, and proceeds to speak of all these deposits without distinguishing one from the other, many of his readers will suppose that he is offering proof that the period of twenty-four thousand years which he claims for the highest post tertiary beds includes the period of human existence. Throughout this chapter Lyell stoops to adopt the unscientific mode of accumulative argument-given nine bad reasons to make three good ones! He does not offer proof, he does not even give us a number of sound inductions pointing to something like proof; but joins together conjectural estimates, questionable conclusions, and authoritative assertions, as if a large quantity of such doubtful evidence could supply a small quantity of undoubted proof. The only thing that deserves to be called calculation in these two chapters, is that quoted from M. M. Troyon and Morlot, with reference to the rate of Swiss lake-deposition. We will carry forward these facts to be considered in connection with the second part of the subject. Secondly. Having attempted to prove, that the recent period in itself considerably exceeds the limits fixed by our commonly received chronology, Sir Charles Lyell proceeds to bring forward his proofs of man's existence in a preceding age, of which the antiquity is incomparably greater-an age which men shared with many animals now extinct; and in which the surface and probably the climate of Europe were very different from those of present times. We must go through Lyell's array of facts fully and carefully, to show the whole strength of his position. The human remains of this period consist of a few, a very few, bones, a few fragments of pottery, and an immense number of stone implements. They are found chiefly in two situations-either in valley alluviums or cave-bone beds. With one or two exceptions, human bones have been found only in the caves; but as we do not dispute that the flint implements are of human manufacture, their presence must be reckoned equally conclusive of the existence of the human race. I. Cave deposits. In limestone formations all over Europe, large fissures are to be found, often widening into caves, which contain deposits of gravel and mud, evidently brought there by water, covered by a layer of stalagmite. The contents of many of these caves have been carefully examined by scientific men; and the result has been singularly uniform. The bones of man or the tools of man have been found inseparably mixed with the bones of recent and extinct animals. Out of forty caves examined in the neighborhood of Liége, human bones were found in two, and flint knives generally dispersed through the mud of the others, mixed with the bones of extinct species of elephant, rhinoceros, bear, tiger, and hyæna, and living species, such as "red deer, roe, wild cat, wild boar, wolf, fox, weasel, beaver, hare, rabbit, hedgehog, mole, dormouse, field-mouse, water-rat, shrew, and others." The same intimate mixture of human remains with those of recent and extinct mammalia has been found in the cavern of Pondres, near Nismes, in Kent's Hole, Torquay, in Brixham cavern, at Archy sur Yonne, near Wokey Hole, Somersetshire, and in the Gower caves, South-Wales. Species long extinct, species historically lost, species now living in distant climes, are found in the same cave; the mammoth, the Irish elk, the wild bull, the hippopotamus, the reindeer, and the horse, unaccountably jumbled together. Added to this, there is the remarkable instance of the burial place at Aurignac, where human bones lie entombed on a layer of made ground containing bones of living and extinct mammalia. At one time it was contended, that these cave deposits merely bore testimony to a confusion of later and earlier remains; that the tools and bones of man had been washed into cavities where the bones of animals had rested before him, and been whirled into intimate conjunction by the eddies of subterranean currents. Lyell himself says, "That such intermixtures have really taken place in some caverns, and that geologists have occasionally been deceived, and have assigned to one and the same period fossils which had really been introduced at successive times, will readily be conceded." Nevertheless, there is proof that this has not always been the case. In the Brixham cave, close to a very perfect flint tool, there was found the entire hind-leg of a cave bear, every bone in its natural place, clearly proving that it must have been introduced clothed with its muscles. Had the flint tool been subsequently buried close to it by the eddies of a subterranean current, these bones would have been washed asunder and scattered. A hind limb of an extinct rhinoceros has been found under the same circumstances in gravel containing flint implements at Menchecourt. On this point, the evidence of the burial-place at Aurignac must be considered decisive. Human bones lie upon a layer that contains extinct bones; and this bone-containing layer is itself resting on a bed eight inches thick "of ashes and charcoal, with broken, burnt, and gnawed bones of extinct and recent mammalia; also hearth-stones and works of art." In the face of such evidence, it is impossible to deny that man was a cotemporary of many animals that have long been extinct. At the same time, it does not follow that the era of man and the era of the extinct animals were truly syn chronous. On the contrary, it would seem, that the conclusion of one overlapped the commencement of the other; for we find the last relics of the mammoth, cave bear, hyæna, etc., and the first human remains, in the very same deposits. We have, indeed, And why not? hitherto supposed that these extinct mammalia were more ancient than man; but as our evidence proves them to have been coëval, we come to the conclusion, not that man is more ancient, but that these animals are more modern than we had supposed. But that is the very conclusion to which we are forbidden to come. "When we desire to reason or speculate on the probable antiquity of human bones found fossil in such situations as the caverns near Liége, there are two classes of evidence to which we may appeal for our guidance. First, considerations of the time required to allow of many species of carnivorous and herbivorous animals, which flourished in the cave period, becoming first scarce, and then so entirely before the era of the Danish peat and Swiss extinct as we have seen that they had become lake dwellings; secondly, the great number of centuries necessary for the conversion of the physical geography of the Liége district from its ancient to its present configuration; so many old underground channels, through which brooks and rivers flowed in the cave period, being now laid dry and choked up."— Page 73. It seems, then, that the mixture of human remains with the bones of extinct animals is but a first step in the argument which is to establish the great antiquity of man. Of course Sir Charles Lyell will proceed to prove to us, first, that time is the chief element in the destruction of species, and that therefore the destruction of species is a true measure of the lapse of time; and, secondly, that altered physical geography bears on its face such evidence of the causes that altered it, as to leave us no other conclusion than that it has been only subjected to the ordinary effects of time. Now let us hear the evidence on these two points; for, if these two points can not be satisfactorily established, the first step in the argument, that is, the mixture of human implements with bones of the extinct mammalia, is worth absolutely nothing. In support of the first point, Lyell gives us no data, no facts, no proofs whatsoever; he simply takes it for granted in his a fortiori argument that if ten or twelve thousand years be allotted to the recent period which has witnessed so little change in the animal creation, tens of thousands must be reckoned for that more ancient period in which so many animals existed that have completely passed away. In proof of the physical coast, and other signs of great alteration changes which (as he asserts) have suc- in the relative levels of land and sea, ceeded the deposition of cave-bone beds, since that country was inhabited by the his chief argument is founded on the pre-extinct mammalia, some of which were sent situation of these limestone caves. certainly coëval with man." In Sardinia, Many of them debouch on the face of a bed of marine shells, in the midst of precipitious hills, far above the present which a ball of baked earthenware was drainage lines of the country. The found, is now three hundred feet above caverns of Liége are sometimes two the sea. Such changes, at an average hundred feet above the Meuse and its rate of elevation of two and half feet in a tributaries. century would give to the pottery an antiquity of twelve thousand years. "There appears, also, in many cases, to be such a correspondence in the openings of caverns on opposite sides of some of the valleys, as to incline one to suspect that they originally belonged to a series of tunnels and galleries which were continuous before the present system of drainage came into play, or before the existing valleys were scooped out. The loess, also, in the suburbs and neighborhood of Liége, occurring at various hights in patches lying at between twenty and two hundred feet above the river, can not be explained without supposing the filling up and reëxcavation of the valleys at a period posterior to the washing in of the animal remains into most of the old caverns."-Page 73. The Neanderthal cave is sixty feet above the stream: so is the Brixham cavern. "A glance at the position of the latter, and a brief survey of the valleys which bound it on two sides, are enough to satisfy a geologist that the drainage and geographical features of this region have undergone great changes since the gravel and bone earth were carried by streams into the subterranean cavities above described. Some worn pebbles of hematite, in particular, can only have come from their nearest parent rock, at a period when the valleys immediately adjoining the caves were much shallower than they now are."-Page 101. With respect to Wokey Hole, Lyell "feels convinced that a complete revolution must have taken place in the topography of the district since the time of the extinct quadrupeds." The Gower caves contain the teeth of hippopotami; " and this in a district where there is now scarce a rill of running water, much less a river in which such quadrupeds could swim. Also, they have, in general, their floor strewed over with sand, containing marine shells, all of living species; and there are raised beaches on the adjoining This is all the evidence brought forward to prove the vast physical changes which have taken place since the desposition of the cave bone-beds. Does it deserve to be called proof? These caves, it seems, are tens or hundreds of feet above the present drainage of the country, and it is thence argued that enormous changes must have taken place since streams ran through them. But why need we suppose that they were ever per. manent water-courses ?-why not the rain channels of the country? We do not think geologists sufficiently take into account that covering of the bare rock which decomposition, vegetation, and, most of all, cultivation, have spread over the whole habitable world. When first a bare limestone country, full of fissures, rises from the sea, the mere rush of the tide would tend to sweep or to suck out the former contents of the fissures, while the shattered surface would make subterranean drainage the rule, surface drainage the exception; and it would only be as decomposition supplied materials for a surface covering, that surface dainage would become the common rule. These caves probably served the same purpose in the hill, that a dry water course now does on the hill; with this difference, that by internal and external cummunication with a series of fissures and caverns they would possess great facilities for collecting and permanently lodging animal remains; and also stone weapons borne by wounded animals from the attacks of man. In many cases, these caves are seen to have been in communication with the present surface by apertures now choked up; and that the present surface might have been in the same communication with a former surface of larger area, we may take for granted, from our knowledge of the fissured nature of a limestone district, and of the waste that must have taken place in some thousands of years. |