I.  THE THUNDER-STONES.




While the view of chronology based upon the literal acceptance of

Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches in Egypt, another

line of observation and thought was slowly developed, even more

fatal to the theological view.



From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, in

various parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone,

some rudely chipped, some polished:  in ancient times the larger

of these were very often considered as thunderbolts, the smaller

as arrows, and all of them as weapons which had been hurled by

the gods and other supernatural personages.  Hence a sort of

sacredness attached to them.  In Chaldea, they were built into

the wall of temples; in Egypt, they were strung about the necks

of the dead.  In India, fine specimens are to this day seen upon

altars, receiving prayers and sacrifices.



Naturally these beliefs were brought into the Christian mythology

and adapted to it.  During the Middle Ages many of these

well-wrought stones were venerated as weapons, which during the

"war in heaven" had been used in driving forth Satan and his

hosts; hence in the eleventh century an Emperor of the East sent

to the Emperor of the West a "heaven axe"; and in the twelfth

century a Bishop of Rennes asserted the value of thunder-stones

as a divinely- appointed means of securing success in battle,

safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity from

unpleasant dreams.  Even as late as the seventeenth century a

French ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in

the museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun,

and claimed for it health-giving virtues.



In the last years of the sixteenth century Michael Mercati tried

to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of

early races of men; but from some cause his book was not

published until the following century, when other thinkers had

begun to take up the same idea, and then it had to contend with a

theory far more accordant with theologic modes of reasoning in

science.  This was the theory of the learned Tollius, who in 1649

told the world that these chipped or smoothed stones were

"generated in the sky by a fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a

cloud by the circumposed humour."



But about the beginning of the eighteenth century a fact of great

importance was quietly established.  In the year 1715 a large

pointed weapon of black flint was found in contact with the bones

of an elephant, in a gravel bed near Gray's Inn Lane, in London.

The world in general paid no heed to this:  if the attention of

theologians was called to it, they dismissed it summarily with a

reference to the Deluge of Noah; but the specimen was labelled,

the circumstances regarding it were recorded, and both specimen

and record carefully preserved.



In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The Origin and

Uses of Thunder-stones.  He showed that recent travellers from

various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and

other implements of stone to France, and that they were

essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as

"thunder-stones."  A year later this fact was clinched into the

scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published a

work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines

then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants

of Europe.  So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the

science of Comparative Ethnography.



But it was at their own risk and peril that thinkers drew from

these discoveries any conclusions as to the antiquity of man.

Montesquieu, having ventured to hint, in an early edition of his

Persian Letters, that the world might be much older than had

been generally supposed, was soon made to feel danger both to his

book and to himself, so that in succeeding editions he suppressed

the passage.



In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Academy of

Inscriptions on the so-called "thunder-stones," and also

presented a series of plates which showed that these were stone

implements, which must have been used at an early period in human

history.



In 1778 Buffon, in his Epoques de la Nature, intimated his

belief that "thunder-stones" were made by early races of men;

but he did not press this view, and the reason for his reserve

was obvious enough:  he had already one quarrel with the

theologians on his hands, which had cost him dear--public

retraction and humiliation.  His declaration, therefore,

attracted little notice.



In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of thinking men

in England.  In that year John Frere presented to the London

Society of Antiquaries sundry flint implements found in the clay

beds near Hoxne:  that they were of human make was certain, and,

in view of the undisturbed depths in which they were found, the

theory was suggested that the men who made them must have lived

at a very ancient geological epoch; yet even this discovery and

theory passed like a troublesome dream, and soon seemed to be

forgotten.



About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a discussion of

the subject, in the light of various discoveries in the drift and

in caves.  It received wide attention, but theology was soothed

by his temporary concession that these striking relics of human

handiwork, associated with the remains of various extinct

animals, were proofs of the Deluge of Noah.



In 1823 Boue, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, showed to Cuvier

sundry human bones found deep in the alluvial deposits of the

upper Rhine, and suggested that they were of an early geological

period; this Cuvier virtually, if not explicitly, denied.  Great

as he was in his own field, he was not a great geologist; he, in

fact, led geology astray for many years.  Moreover, he lived in a

time of reaction; it was the period of the restored Bourbons, of

the Voltairean King Louis XVIII, governing to please orthodoxy.

Boue's discovery was, therefore, at first opposed, then enveloped

in studied silence.



Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under similar

circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a little"; and

his leading disciple, Elie de Beaumont, who succeeded, him in the

sway over geological science in France, was even more opposed to

the new view than his great master had been.  Boue's discoveries

were, therefore, apparently laid to rest forever.[185]



[185] For the general history of early views regarding stone

implements, see the first chapters in Cartailhac, La France

Prehistorique; also Jolie, L'Homme avant les Metaux; also Lyell,

Lubbock, and Evans.  For lightning-stones in China and elsewhere,

see citation from a Chinese encyclopedia of 1662, in Tylor, Early

History of Mankind, p. 209.  On the universality of this belief,

on the surviving use of stone implements even into civilized

times, and on their manufacture to-day, see ibid., chapter viii.

For the treatment of Boue's discovery, see especially Morillet,

Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, p. 11.  For the suppression of the

passage in Montesquieu's Persian Letters, see Letter 113, cited

in Schlosser's History of the Eighteenth Century (English

translation), vol. i, p. 135.





In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by the Rev.

Mr. McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who seems to have been

completely overawed by orthodox opinion in England and elsewhere;

for, though he found human bones and implements mingled with

remains of extinct animals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and

they were only brought to light more than thirty years later by

Mr. Vivian.



The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bourbons, to the

throne, made the orthodox pressure even greater.  It was the

culmination of the reactionary period--the time in France when a

clerical committee, sitting at the Tuileries, took such measures

as were necessary to hold in check all science that was not

perfectly "safe"; the time in Austria when Kaiser Franz made his

famous declaration to sundry professors, that what he wanted of

them was simply to train obedient subjects, and that those who

did not make this their purpose would be dismissed; the time in

Germany when Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers

under his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth

all their might in behalf of "scriptural science"; the time in

Italy when a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclusion

distrusted by the Church, was sure of losing his place and in

danger of losing his liberty; the time in England when what

little science was taught was held in due submission to

Archdeacon Paley; the time in the United States when the first

thing essential in science was, that it be adjusted to the ideas

of revival exhorters.



Yet men devoted to scientific truth laboured on; and in 1828

Tournal, of Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens

of human industry, with a fragment of a human skeleton, among

bones of extinct animals.  In the following year Christol

published accounts of his excavations in the caverns of Gard; he

had found in position, and under conditions which forbade the

idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of the

extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period.  Little general

notice was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere

involved such discoveries in darkness.



But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old politico-theological

system collapsed:  Charles X and his advisers fled for their

lives; the other continental monarchs got glimpses of new light;

the priesthood in charge of education were put on their good

behaviour for a time, and a better era began.



Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Orleans in

France and Belgium less attention was therefore paid by

Government to the saving of souls; and we have in rapid

succession new discoveries of remains of human industry, and even

of human skeletons so mingled with bones of extinct animals as to

give additional proofs that the origin of man was at a period

vastly earlier than any which theologians had dreamed of.



A few years later the reactionary clerical influence against

science in this field rallied again.  Schmerling in 1833 had

explored a multitude of caverns in Belgium, especially at Engis

and Engihoul, and had found human skulls and bones closely

associated with bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear,

hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, while mingled with these were

evidences of human workmanship in the shape of chipped flint

implements; discoveries of a similar sort had been made by De

Serres in France and by Lund in Brazil; but, at least as far as

continental Europe was concerned, these discoveries were received

with much coolness both by Catholic leaders of opinion in France

and Belgium and by Protestant leaders in England and Holland.

Schmerling himself appears to have been overawed, and gave forth

a sort of apologetic theory, half scientific, half theologic,

vainly hoping to satisfy the clerical side.



Nor was it much better in England.  Sir Charles Lyell, so devoted

a servant of prehistoric research thirty years later, was still

holding out against it on the scientific side; and, as to the

theological side, it was the period when that great churchman,

Dean Cockburn, was insulting geologists from the pulpit of York

Minster, and the Rev. Mellor Brown denouncing geology as "a

black art," "a forbidden province" and when, in America, Prof.

Moses Stuart and others like him were belittling the work of

Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock.



In 1840 Godwin Austin presented to the Royal Geological Society

an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, and

especially of human bones and implements mingled with bones of

the elephant, rhinoceros, cave bear, hyena, and other extinct

animals; yet this memoir, like that of McEnery fifteen years

before, found an atmosphere so unfavourable that it was not

published.







II.  THE FLINT WEAPONS AND IMPLEMENTS.





At the middle of the nineteenth century came the beginning of a

new epoch in science--an epoch when all these earlier discoveries

were to be interpreted by means of investigations in a different

field:  for, in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at

large, Boucher de Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of

his work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he

showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of

which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high

drift beds near Abbeville, in northern France.



The significance of this discovery was great indeed--far greater

than Boucher himself at first supposed.  The very title of his

book showed that he at first regarded these implements and

weapons as having belonged to men overwhelmed at the Deluge of

Noah; but it was soon seen that they were something very

different from proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis:  for

they were found in terraces at great heights above the river

Somme, and, under any possible theory having regard to fact, must

have been deposited there at a time when the river system of

northern France was vastly different from anything known within

the historic period.  The whole discovery indicated a series of

great geological changes since the time when these implements

were made, requiring cycles of time compared to which the space

allowed by the orthodox chronologists was as nothing.



His work was the result of over ten years of research and

thought.  Year after year a force of men under his direction had

dug into these high-terraced gravel deposits of the river Somme,

and in his book he now gave, in the first full form, the results

of his labour.  So far as France was concerned, he was met at

first by what he calls "a conspiracy of silence," and then by a

contemptuous opposition among orthodox scientists, at the head of

whom stood Elie de Beaumont.



This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable:  nothing that

Boucher could do or say appeared to lighten the pressure of the

orthodox theological opinion behind it; not even his belief that

these fossils were remains of men drowned at the Deluge of Noah,

and that they were proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis

seemed to help the matter.  His opponents felt instinctively that

such discoveries boded danger to the accepted view, and they were

right:  Boucher himself soon saw the folly of trying to account

for them by the orthodox theory.



And it must be confessed that not a little force was added to the

opposition by certain characteristics of Boucher de Perthes

himself.  Gifted, far-sighted, and vigorous as he was, he was his

own worst enemy.  Carried away by his own discoveries, he jumped

to the most astounding conclusions.  The engravings in the later

volume of his great work, showing what he thought to be human

features and inscriptions upon some of the flint implements, are

worthy of a comic almanac; and at the National Museum of

Archaeology at St. Germain, beneath the shelves bearing the

remains which he discovered, which mark the beginning of a new

epoch in science, are drawers containing specimens hardly worthy

of a penny museum, but from which he drew the most unwarranted

inferences as to the language, religion, and usages of

prehistoric man.



Boucher triumphed none the less.  Among his bitter opponents at

first was Dr. Rigollot, who in 1855, searching earnestly for

materials to refute the innovator, dug into the deposits of St.

Acheul--and was converted:  for he found implements similar to

those of Abbeville, making still more certain the existence of

man during the Drift period.  So, too, Gaudry a year later made

similar discoveries.



But most important was the evidence of the truth which now came

from other parts of France and from other countries.  The French

leaders in geological science had been held back not only by awe

of Cuvier but by recollections of Scheuchzer.  Ridicule has

always been a serious weapon in France, and the ridicule which

finally overtook the supporters of the attempt of Scheuchzer,

Mazurier, and others, to square geology with Genesis, was still

remembered. From the great body of French geologists, therefore,

Boucher secured at first no aid.  His support came from the other

side of the Channel.  The most eminent English geologists, such

as Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, visited the beds at Abbeville

and St. Acheul, convinced themselves that the discoveries of

Boucher, Rigollot, and their colleagues were real, and then

quietly but firmly told England the truth.



And now there appeared a most effective ally in France.  The

arguments used against Boucher de Perthes and some of the other

early investigators of bone caves had been that the implements

found might have been washed about and turned over by great

floods, and therefore that they might be of a recent period; but

in 1861 Edward Lartet published an account of his own excavations

at the Grotto of Aurignac, and the proof that man had existed in

the time of the Quaternary animals was complete.  This grotto had

been carefully sealed in prehistoric times by a stone at its

entrance; no interference from disturbing currents of water had

been possible; and Lartet found, in place, bones of eight out of

nine of the main species of animals which characterize the

Quaternary period in Europe; and upon them marks of cutting

implements, and in the midst of them coals and ashes.



Close upon these came the excavations at Eyzies by Lartet and his

English colleague, Christy.  In both these men there was a

carefulness in making researches and a sobriety in stating

results which converted many of those who had been repelled by

the enthusiasm of Boucher de Perthes.  The two colleagues found

in the stony deposits made by the water dropping from the roof of

the cave at Eyzies the bones of numerous animals extinct or

departed to arctic regions--one of these a vertebra of a reindeer

with a flint lance-head still fast in it, and with these were

found evidences of fire.



Discoveries like these were thoroughly convincing; yet there

still remained here and there gainsayers in the supposed interest

of Scripture, and these, in spite of the convincing array of

facts, insisted that in some way, by some combination of

circumstances, these bones of extinct animals of vastly remote

periods might have been brought into connection with all these

human bones and implements of human make in all these different

places, refusing to admit that these ancient relics of men and

animals were of the same period.  Such gainsayers virtually

adopted the reasoning of quaint old Persons, who, having

maintained that God created the world "about five thousand sixe

hundred and odde yeares agoe," added, "And if they aske what God

was doing before this short number of yeares, we answere with St.

Augustine replying to such curious questioners, that He was

framing Hell for them."  But a new class of discoveries came to

silence this opposition.  At La Madeleine in France, at the

Kessler cave in Switzerland, and at various other places, were

found rude but striking carvings and engravings on bone and stone

representing sundry specimens of those long-vanished species;

and these specimens, or casts of them, were soon to be seen in

all the principal museums.  They showed the hairy mammoth, the

cave bear, and various other animals of the Quaternary period,

carved rudely but vigorously by contemporary men; and, to

complete the significance of these discoveries, travellers

returning from the icy regions of North America brought similar

carvings of animals now existing in those regions, made by the

Eskimos during their long arctic winters to-day.[186]



[186] For the explorations in Belgium, see Dupont, Le Temps

Prehistorique en Belgique.  For the discoveries by McEnery and

Godwin Austin, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, London, 1869,

chap. x; also Cartailhac, Joly, and others above cited.  For

Boucher de Perthes, see his Antiquites Celtiques et

Antediluviennes, Paris, 1847-'64, vol. iii, pp. 526 et seq.  For

sundry extravagances of Boucher de Perthes, see Reinach,

Description raisonne du Musee de St.-Germain-en-Laye, Paris,

1889, vol. i, pp. 16 et seq.  For the mixture of sound and absurd

results in Boucher's work, see Cartailhac as above, p. 19.

Boucher had published in 1838 a work entitled De la Creation, but

it seems to have dropped dead from the press.  For the attempts

of Scheuchzer to reconcile geology and Genesis by means of the

Homo diluvii testis, and similar "diluvian fossils," see the

chapter on Geology in this series. The original specimens of

these prehistoric engravings upon bone and stone may best be seen

at the Archaeological Museum of St.-Germain and the British

Museum.  For engravings of some of the most recent, see

especially Dawkin's Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, and the

Description du Musee de St.-Germain.  As to the Kessler etchings

and their antiquity, see D. G. Brinton, in Science, August 12,

1892.  For comparison of this prehistoric work with that produced

to-day by the Eskimos and others, see Lubbock, Prehistoric Times,

chapters x and xiv.  For very striking exhibitions of this same

artistic gift in a higher field to-day by descendants of the

barbarian tribes of northern America, see the very remarkable

illustrations in Rink, Danish Greenland, London, 1877, especially

those in chap. xiv.





As a result of these discoveries and others like them, showing

that man was not only contemporary with long-extinct animals of

past geological epochs, but that he had already developed into a

stage of culture above pure savagery, the tide of thought began

to turn.  Especially was this seen in 1863, when Lyell published

the first edition of his Geological Evidence of the Antiquity of

Man; and the fact that he had so long opposed the new ideas gave

force to the clear and conclusive argument which led him to

renounce his early scientific beliefs.



Research among the evidences of man's existence in the early

Quaternary, and possibly in the Tertiary period, was now pressed

forward along the whole line.  In 1864 Gabriel Mortillet founded

his review devoted to this subject; and in 1865 the first of a

series of scientific congresses devoted to such researches was

held in Italy.  These investigations went on vigorously in all

parts of France and spread rapidly to other countries.  The

explorations which Dupont began in 1864, in the caves of Belgium,

gave to the museum at Brussels eighty thousand flint implements,

forty thousand bones of animals of the Quaternary period, and a

number of human skulls and bones found mingled with these

remains.  From Germany, Italy, Spain, America, India, and Egypt

similar results were reported.



Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of the caves

and drift throughout the British Islands.  The discovery by

Colonel Wood, In 1861, of flint tools in the same strata with

bones of the earlier forms of the rhinoceros, was but typical of

many.  A thorough examination of the caverns of Brixham and

Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it still more evident that

man had existed in the early Quaternary period.  The existence of

a period before the Glacial epoch or between different glacial

epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude

stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more

significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution

even in the history of that period.  It was found that this

ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development.  In the

upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who,

although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more

northern climates, were found stone implements revealing some

little advance in civilization; next below these, sealed up in

the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which the

remains of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth more

frequent, the implements found in this stratum being less

skilfully made than those in the upper and more recent layers;

and, finally, in the lowest levels, near the floors of these

ancient caverns, with remains of the cave bear and others of the

most ancient extinct animals, were found stone implements

evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress.  No

fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay

without being convinced that there were a gradation and an

evolution in these beginnings of human civilization.  The

evidence is complete; the masses of breccia taken from the cave,

with the various soils, implements, and bones carefully kept in

place, put this progress beyond a doubt.



All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in

it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more

important and more serious in its consequences to the older

theologic view, which will be discussed in the following chapter.



But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of

man.  Remains of animals were found in connection with human

remains, which showed not only that man was living in times more

remote than the earlier of the new investigators had dared dream,

but that some of these early periods of his existence must have

been of immense length, embracing climatic changes betokening

different geological periods; for with remains of fire and human

implements and human bones were found not only bones of the hairy

mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer, which

could only have been deposited there in a time of arctic cold,

but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, sabre-toothed tiger, and

the like, which could only have been deposited when there was in

these regions a torrid climate.  The conjunction of these remains

clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and

long enough to pass through times when there was arctic cold and

times when there was torrid heat; times when great glaciers

stretched far down into England and indeed into the continent,

and times when England had a land connection with the European

continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing

tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle

regions of England.



The question of the origin of man at a period vastly earlier than

the sacred chronologists permitted was thus absolutely settled,

but among the questions regarding the existence of man at a

period yet more remote, the Drift period, there was one which for

a time seemed to give the champions of science some difficulty.

The orthodox leaders in the time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a

considerable time afterward, had a weapon of which they made

vigorous use:  the statement that no human bones had yet been

discovered in the drift.  The supporters of science naturally

answered that few if any other bones as small as those of man had

been found, and that this fact was an additional proof of the

great length of the period since man had lived with the extinct

animals; for, since specimens of human workmanship proved man's

existence as fully as remains of his bones could do, the absence

or even rarity of human and other small bones simply indicated

the long periods of time required for dissolving them away.



Yet Boucher, inspired by the genius he had already shown, and

filled with the spirit of prophecy, declared that human bones

would yet be found in the midst of the flint implements, and in

1863 he claimed that this prophecy had been fulfilled by the

discovery at Moulin Quignon of a portion of a human jaw deep in

the early Quaternary deposits.  But his triumph was short-lived:

the opposition ridiculed his discovery; they showed that he had

offered a premium to his workmen for the discovery of human

remains, and they naturally drew the inference that some tricky

labourer had deceived him.  The result of this was that the men

of science felt obliged to acknowledge that the Moulin Quignon

discovery was not proven.



But ere long human bones were found in the deposits of the early

Quaternary period, or indeed of an earlier period, in various

other parts of the world, and the question regarding the Moulin

Quignon relic was of little importance.



We have seen that researches regarding the existence of

prehistoric man in England and on the Continent were at first

mainly made in the caverns; but the existence of man in the

earliest Quaternary period was confirmed on both sides of the

English Channel, in a way even more striking, by the close

examination of the drift and early gravel deposits.  The results

arrived at by Boucher de Perthes were amply confirmed in England.

Rude stone implements were found in terraces a hundred feet and

more above the levels at which various rivers of Great Britain

now flow, and under circumstances which show that, at the time

when they were deposited, the rivers of Great Britain in many

cases were entirely different from those of the present period,

and formed parts of the river system of the European continent.

Researches in the high terraces above the Thames and the Ouse, as

well as at other points in Great Britain, placed beyond a doubt

the fact that man existed on the British Islands at a time when

they were connected by solid land with the Continent, and made it

clear that, within the period of the existence of man in northern

Europe, a large portion of the British Islands had been sunk to

depths between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred feet

beneath the Northern Ocean,--had risen again from the water,--had

formed part of the continent of Europe, and had been in unbroken

connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers, lions,

the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly extinct,

had left their bones in the same deposits with human implements

as far north as Yorkshire.  Moreover, connected with this fact

came in the new conviction, forced upon geologists by the more

careful examination of the earth and its changes, that such

elevations and depressions of Great Britain and other parts of

the world were not necessarily the results of sudden cataclysms,

but generally of slow processes extending through vast cycles of

years--processes such as are now known to be going on in various

parts of the world.  Thus it was that the six or seven thousand

years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former times

were seen more and more clearly to be but a mere nothing in the

long succession of ages since the appearance of man.



Confirmation of these results was received from various other

parts of the world.  In Africa came the discovery of flint

implements deep in the hard gravel of the Nile Valley at Luxor

and on the high hills behind Esneh.  In America the discoveries

at Trenton, N.J., and at various places in Delaware, Ohio,

Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern edge of the drift of

the Glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific truth yet more

firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American authority

is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice of

Greenland extended to the mouth of New York harbour."  The

discoveries of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and

especially in British Columbia, finished completely the last

chance at a reasonable contention by the adherents of the older

view.  As to these investigations on the Pacific slope of the

United States, the discoveries of Whitney and others in

California had been so made and announced that the judgment of

scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of

perhaps the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred

Russel Wallace, in 1887.  He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney

and others with the statement that "both the actual remains and

works of man found deep under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show

that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the

Old."  To this may be added the discoveries in British Columbia,

which prove that, since man existed in these regions, "valleys

have been filled up by drift from the waste of mountains to a

depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered by a

succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long

since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through

beds of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and

gravels."  The immense antiquity of the human remains in the

gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most eminent

English authority and declared to be proved, "first, by the

present river systems being of subsequent date, sometimes cutting

through them and their superincumbent lava-cap to a depth of two

thousand feet; secondly, by the great denudation that has taken

place since they were deposited, for they sometimes lie on the

summits of mountains six thousand feet high; thirdly, by the

fact that the Sierra Nevada has been partly elevated since their

formation."[187]



[187] For the general subject of investigations in British

prehistoric remains, see especially Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in

Britain and his Place in the Tertiary Period, London, 1880.  For

Boucher de Perthes's account of his discovery of the human jaw at

Moulin Quignon, see his Antiquites Celtiques et Antediluviennes,

vol. iii, p. 542 et seq., Appendix.  For an excellent account of

special investigations in the high terraces above the Thames, see

J. Allen Brown, F. G. S., Palaeolithic Man in Northwest

Middlesex, London, 1887.  For discoveries in America, and the

citations regarding them, see Wright, the Ice Age in North

America, New York, 1889, chap. xxi.  Very remarkable examples of

these specimens from the drift at Trenton may be seen in Prof.

Abbott's collections at the University of Pennsylvania.  For an

admirable statement, see Prof. Henry W. Haynes, in Wright, as

above.  For proofs of the vast antiquity of man upon the Pacific

coast, cited in the text, see Skertchley, F. G. S., in the

Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1887, p. 336; see

also Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1890, chap. xv; and for a

striking summary of the evidence that man lived before the last

submergence of Britain, see Brown, Palaeolithic Man in Northwest

Middlesex, as above cited.  For proofs that man existed in a

period when the streams were flowing hundreds of feet above their

present level, see ibid., p. 33.  As to the evidence of the

action of the sea and of glacial action in the Welsh bone caves

after the remains of extinct animals and weapons of human

workmanship had been deposited, see ibid., p. 198.  For a good

statement of the slowness of the submergance and emergence of

Great Britain, with an illustration from the rising of the shore

of Finland, see ibid., pp. 47, 48.  As to the flint implements of

Palaeolithic man in the high terraced gravels throughout the

Thames Valley, associated with bones of the mammoth, woolly

rhinoceros, etc., see Brown, p. 31.  For still more conclusive

proofs that man inhabited North Wales before the last submergence

of the greater part of the British Islands to a depth of twelve

hundred to fourteen hundred feet, see ibid., pp. 199, 200.  For

maps showing the connection of the British river system with that

of the Continent, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London,

1880, pp. 18, 41, 73; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man, chap. xiv.

As to the long continuance of the early Stone period, see James

Geikie, The Great Ice Age, New York, 1888, p. 402.  As to the

impossibility of the animals of the arctic and torrid regions

living together or visiting the same place at different times in

the same year, see Geikie, as above, pp. 421 et seq.; and for a

conclusive argument that the animals of the period assigned lived

in England not since, but before, the Glacial period, or in the

intergalcial period, see ibid., p. 459.  For a very candid

statement by perhaps the foremost leader of the theological rear-

guard, admitting the insuperable difficulties presented by the

Old Testament chronology as regards the Creation and the Deluge,

see the Duke of Argyll's Primeval Man, pp. 90-100, and especially

pp. 93, 124.  For a succinct statement on the general subject,

see Laing, Problems of the Future, London, 1889, chapters v and

vi.  For discoveries of prehistoric implements in India, see

notes by Bruce Foote, F. G. S., in the British Journal of the

Anthropological Institute for 1886 and 1887.  For similar

discoveries in South Africa, see Gooch, in Journal of the

Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xi,

pp. 124 et seq.  For proofs of the existance of Palaeolithic man

in Egypt, see Mook, Haynes, Pitt-Rivers, Flinders-Petrie, and

others, cited at length in the next chapter.  For the

corroborative and concurrent testimony of ethnology, philology,

and history to the vast antiquity of man, see Tylor,

Anthropology, chap. i.





As an important supplement to these discoveries of ancient

implements came sundry comparisons made by eminent physiologists

between human skulls and bones found in different places and

under circumstances showing vast antiquity.



Human bones had been found under such circumstances as early as

1835 at Cannstadt near Stuttgart, and in 1856 in the Neanderthal

near Dusseldorf; but in more recent searches they had been

discovered in a multitude of places, especially in Germany,

France, Belgium, England, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and

South America.  Comparison of these bones showed that even in

that remote Quaternary period there were great differences of

race, and here again came in an argument for the yet earlier

existence of man on the earth; for long previous periods must

have been required to develop such racial differences.

Considerations of this kind gave a new impulse to the belief that

man's existence might even date back into the Tertiary period.

The evidence for this earlier origin of man was ably summed up,

not only by its brilliant advocate, Mortillet, but by a former

opponent, one of the most conservative of modern anthropologists,

Quatrefages;  and the conclusion arrived at by both was, that man

did really exist in the Tertiary period.  The acceptance of this

conclusion was also seen in the more recent work of Alfred Russel

Wallace, who, though very cautious and conservative, placed the

origin of man not only in the Tertiary period, but in an earlier

stage of it than most had dared assign--even in the Miocene.



The first thing raising a strong presumption, if not giving

proof, that man existed in the Tertiary, was the fact that from

all explored parts of the world came in more and more evidence

that in the earlier Quaternary man existed in different, strongly

marked races and in great numbers.  From all regions which

geologists had explored, even from those the most distant and

different from each other, came this same evidence--from northern

Europe to southern Africa; from France to China; from New

Jersey to British Columbia; from British Columbia to Peru.  The

development of man in such numbers and in so many different

regions, with such differences of race and at so early a period,

must have required a long previous time.



This argument was strengthened by discoveries of bones bearing

marks apparently made by cutting instruments, in the Tertiary

formations of France and Italy, and by the discoveries of what

were claimed to be flint implements by the Abbe Bourgeois in

France, and of implements and human bones by Prof. Capellini in

Italy.



On the other hand, some of the more cautious men of science are

still content to say that the existence of man in the Tertiary

period is not yet proven.  As to his existence throughout the

Quaternary epoch, no new proofs are needed; even so determined a

supporter of the theological side as the Duke of Argyll has been

forced to yield to the evidence.



Of attempts to make an exact chronological statement throwing

light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most

notable have been those by M.  Morlot, on the accumulated strata

of the Lake of Geneva; by Gillieron, on the silt of Lake

Neufchatel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by

Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi.  But while these have

failed to give anything like an exact result, all these

investigations together point to the central truth, so amply

established, of the vast antiquity of man, and the utter

inadequacy of the chronology given in our sacred books.  The

period of man's past life upon our planet, which has been fixed

by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," is

thus perfectly proved to be insignificant compared with those

vast geological epochs during which man is now known to have

existed.[188]



[188] As to the evidence of man in the Tertiary period, see works

already cited, especially Quatrefages, Cartailhac, and Mortillet.

For an admirable summary, see Laing, Human Origins, chap. viii.

See also, for a summing up of the evidence in favour of man in

the Tertiary period, Quatrefages, History Generale des Races

Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, chap.

iv.  As to the earlier view, see Vogt, Lectures on Man, London,

1864, lecture xi.  For a thorough and convincing refutation of

Sir J. W. Dawson's attempt to make the old and new Stone periods

coincide, see H. W. Haynes, in chap. vi of the History of

America, edited by Justin Winsor.  For development of various

important points in the relation of anthropology to the human

occupancy of our planet, see Topinard, Anthropology, London,

1890, chap. ix.