J. N. Darby.
<44014E> 96
(Notes and Comments Vol. 4.)
{"The geological evidences of the Antiquity of Man, with remarks on theories of the origin of species by variation." By Sir Charles Lyell, F.R.S. Third edition, revised. London, John Murray, Albemarle Street, London, 1863.}
In reading this book one can only say: Wise people often confound themselves by their too great wisdom - its narrow limits, or endless modifications always suppose it to exist. It is very natural that the unlearned, who have not confused themselves, should be surprised at the learned ignorance of those who have.
Chapter 2. "The deposits of peat in Denmark, varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, have been formed in hollows or depressions in the northern drift or boulder formation hereafter to be described." "Around the borders of the bogs, and at various depths in them, lie trunks of trees, especially of the Scotch fir, often three feet in diameter, which must have grown on the margin of the peat-mosses, and have frequently fallen into them. This tree is not now, nor has ever been in historical times, a native of the Danish Islands, and when introduced there has not thriven; yet it was evidently indigenous in the human period, for Steenstrup has taken out with his own hands a flint instrument from below a buried trunk of one of these pines." "The oak has now in its turn been almost superseded in Denmark by the common beech. Other trees, such as the white birch, characterise the lower part of the bogs, and disappear from the higher; while others again, like the aspen, occur at all levels, and still flourish in Denmark." "The capercailzie is also met with, and may, it is suggested, have fed on the buds of the Scotch fir in times when that tree flourished around the peat-bogs." "The minimum of time required for the formation of so much peat must, according to the estimate of Steenstrup, and other good authorities, have amounted to at least 4,000 years."
Flourishing around the peat-bogs may be, but in general it is not the case. The trees have formed the bog in great part. I distrust all these statements wholly as to the time of bogs being formed. In certain circumstances they form rapidly. But with all his desire for long dates, his authorities only go to 4,000 years, and man does not reach to the bottom. The lowest part was probably formed before trees were there, and then trees helped to form the rest, like a cedar swamp. In Canada another kind of tree always grows when the first growth is cut down. Swamp and bog stuff, and a peculiar grass form bog earth, and then, if trees grew and fell, as they easily do in bogs, or when hewn, they rapidly form a mass of bog, some only being preserved sound. Now thus, on his own showing, the date is, on the shorter chronology, long since the flood.
97 As to the ancient Swiss dwellings, we get another fact. In Eastern, i.e., wild mountainous Switzerland beyond the plateau, there are only stone remains. Page 18. "During the dredging operations on the Lake of Zurich, they discovered a number of wooden piles deeply driven into the bed of the lake, and among them a great many hammers, axes, celts and other instruments. All these belonged to the Stone period with two exceptions, namely, an armlet of thin brass wire, and a small bronze hatchet." Now there may have very likely been a ruder contemporaneous class. Near Berne itself we get into the cold Alpine region. Denmark may have been put as far back in civilization, just as Britain in the time of the Roman conquest - at least as to agriculture. Bronze instruments are not beyond Greek and Marseilles, i.e., long within the time of history.
Page 27. "The most elaborate calculation is that made by M. Morlot, respecting the delta of the Tiniere, a torrent which flows into the Lake of Geneva, near Villeneuve. This small delta, to which the stream is annually making additions, is composed of gravel and sand. Its shape is that of a flattened cone, and its internal structure has of late been laid open to view in a railway cutting, one thousand feet long and thirty-two feet deep. Three layers of vegetable soil, each of which must at one time have formed the surface of the cone, have been cut through at different depths. This upper layer belonged to the Roman period, and contained Roman tiles and a coin. M. Morlot, assuming the Roman period to represent an antiquity of from sixteen to eighteen centuries, assigns to the Bronze age a date of between 3,000 and 4,000 years, and to the oldest layer, that of the Stone period, an age of from 5,000 to 7,000 years."
I feel some doubts as to la Tiniere, as the Rhone fills that valley too, and it is alleged that part was lake in those early times. Further, as vegetable soil is formed at three distinct heights, the dates, and even the formation itself, as alleged, are uncertain. It may easily, or more likely, have been special floods. That a tiny stream, like la Tiniere, should have raised a delta thirty-two feet, I doubt very much. How came a delta to be a "flattened cone"? Why is the Roman period assumed to be that of Augustus? I suppose the coin said nothing. All this is excessively vague. The judgment is only between 5,000 and 7,000 years. So that, with the utmost desire to make it long, it comes to nothing, unless to prove that man is not ancient, even where man seeks to make him so.
98 Again, supposing the data correct, which again I doubt from what I have seen of Yverdon, and the rapidity of present increase, far more from throwing up sand than from the Orbe whose water is very clear - but supposing the Bronze is 3,300 years old, we only get back to a date long since the Flood, at which period there was still the Stone period elsewhere.
As to la Tiniere near Villeneuve, I now know what this little torrential rivulet is. Montreux not Ayn side of the station. But Lyell has taken a testimony in the most credulous way from Morlot. I have it from a member of the Lausanne Society that all rejected his view of the case. He stood alone. A skull, 8 metres deep, which he would put I forget how many thousands of years off, is deeply and distinctly stained with bronze or verdigris, the distinct proof of its bronze or copper date. It is now in the museum at Lausanne.
Page 29. "The old convent of St. Jean, founded 750 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." "M. Morlot, after examining the ground, thinks it highly probable that the shape of the bottom on which the morass rests is uniform." The judging of the time without knowing the depth is most idle work. "M. Morlot thinks it highly probable"! It is, I should think, highly probable that as it advanced into the lake it grew deeper, and took much longer time to fill up. The vast morass, between Morat, Neuchatel and Bienne lakes, certainly cannot be judged of even as being formed. There is no proof of its not being an abiding state from its mud and the nature of the ground. It is not a delta. It runs along Neuchatel lake where no delta would naturally have been formed, and where the Thiele runs out of Morat, not the Broye into it. The river goes round the hill of Veuilly, and a vast wide plain of moss, or sumpf, goes far into the Canton of Berne, then borders Neuchatel and begins again towards Bienne lake, which I know less, though I have passed up the river in a boat - thus
[SEE PLAN 44_n&c4a.png] GRAPHIC
99 In result we have only the proof that man is not so very ancient. Besides if Bronze was 3,300 years old, in which we have Christianity and the Iron period, it is not very evident why 3,450 years should be for the Stone period, even to the earliest. Chamblon is not above thirty or forty miles from Pont de Thiele in the same valley, with the Lake of Neuchatel between. So that the state of civilisation could not be very different.
Chapter 3, page 37. "The great aim of the criticisms has been to get rid of the supposed anomaly of finding burnt brick and pottery at depths and places which would give them claim to an antiquity far exceeding that of the Roman domination in Egypt. For until the time of the Romans, it is said, no clay was burnt into bricks in the valley of the Nile. But a distinguished antiquary, Mr. S. Birch, assures me that this notion is altogether erroneous, and that he has under his charge in the British Museum, first, a small rectangular baked brick, which came from a Theban tomb, which bears the name of Thothmes, a superintendent of the granaries of the god Amen Ra, the style of art, inscription, and name, showing that it is as old as the 18th dynasty (about 1450 B.C.); secondly, a brick bearing an inscription, partly obliterated, but ending with the words 'of the temple of Amen Ra.' This brick, decidedly long anterior to the Roman dominion, is referred conjecturally, by Mr. Birch, to the 18th dynasty, or 1300 B.C. Sir Gardner Wilkinson has also in his possession pieces of mortar, which he took from each of the three great pyramids, in which bits of broken pottery and of burnt clay or brick are imbedded."
100 These data as to the Nile are altogether too vague to prove anything. A brick, 20 or 30 years off, proves not the date, but that the data afford no ground. For though bricks date back I,400 years before Christ, yet if I find that date, and bricks not used in monuments of very much greater antiquity, it shows that what was not above 2,000 years before Christ may be at that depth, i.e., that the proofs are nil. Babel was made of bricks. So bricks are found in Lower Chaldaea, at any rate as old as Abraham, supposed Chedorlaomer - say 2,000 years before Christ.
Page 40. "It is clear that the Ohio mound-builders had commercial intercourse with the natives of distant regions, for among the buried articles some are made of native copper from Lake Superior, and there are also found mica from the Alleghanies, sea-shells from the Gulf of Mexico, and obsidian from the Mexican mountains." "The extraordinary number of mounds implies a long period, during which a settled agricultural population had made considerable progress in civilisation, so as to acquire large temples for their religious rites, and extensive fortifications to protect them from their enemies."
Page 41. "When I visited Marietta in 1842, Dr. Hildreth took me to one of the mounds, and showed me where he had seen a tree growing on it, the trunk of which when cut down displayed eight hundred rings of annual growth."
101 As to these mounds in Ohio and works in Lake Superior, first it is certain it was not the Stone period, but the metallic tool times, for they are found and copper mines. But further, these copper mine works are found under the same timber forests which are found in Ohio. The timber would only prove moreover, on his own showing, "one generation died out and diversity of species" then having grown up. Nor could it be said that the eight hundred rings were not of the first growth. It is true the first growth after cutting down is mainly of one kind, not however by any means absolutely so. But if the land had been kept cleared, it would not be necessarily so at all, but the contrary. So that all this argument proves will in Sir C. Lyell, and nothing more.
The Santos in Brazil, page 42, I may pass by, saving as remarking how little founded seemingly clear conclusions are.
Page 43. "In one part of the modern delta near New Orleans, a large excavation has been made for gas-works, where a succession of beds, almost wholly made up of vegetable matter, has been passed through, such as we now see forming in the cypress swamps of the neighbourhood … In this excavation, at the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, beneath four buried forests superimposed one upon another, the workmen are stated by Dr. Dowler to have found some charcoal and a human skeleton, the cranium of which is said to belong to the aboriginal type of the Red Indian race. Dr. Dowler ascribes to this skeleton an antiquity of 50,000 years." As to the delta of the Mississippi, we have only Dr. Dowler. If it was the Red Indian he is comparatively modern in America - that is clear, as the Ohio mounds, etc., show. And the islands of mud and forest carried down by the Mississippi made their proofs of no weight whatever, no more than the "canoes of the Clyde."
Page 44. "Professor Agassiz has described a low portion of the peninsula of Florida as consisting of numerous reefs of coral gained gradually from the sea, … and calculates that it has taken 135,000 years to form the southern half of this peninsula." Assuming the rate of advance in Florida is no ground to go on. We know not what upheavals may have been, or what has happened in the interval whatever it is. It is a mere guess, and the circumstances even do not appear.
102 In Scotland, it rather appears from Mr. Geikie's remarks on the Roman wall, that the marks of man must have been within sixteen or seventeen centuries, for then it was those parts were under water, which is confirmed by the facts relative to the Firth of Forth. He says, page 52, "Antiquaries have sometimes wondered that the Romans did not carry their wall further west than Chapel Hill; but Mr. Geikie now suggests, in explanation, that all the low land at present intervening between that point and the mouth of the Clyde, was, sixteen or seventeen centuries ago, washed by the tides at high water. The wall of Antonine, therefore, yields no evidence in favour of the land having remained stationary since the time of the Romans, but on the contrary, appears to indicate that since its erection the land has actually risen." "Alaterva, the chief Roman harbour, was on the southern coast of the Forth, where numerous coins, urns, sculptured stones, and the remnant of a harbour have been detected." "At Aithrie, near Stirling, were found two pieces of stags' horn, artificially cut, through one of which a hole, about an inch in diameter, had been perforated." But note, this goes further, for it tends to show an old stone period toward the same time. No doubt the older boats may have been buried before, but they are connected with the same tide-way, the same state of country and river. It is not a Stone-state at the same time in another place, which may be in Switzerland, and is at this moment. But the same general period and state of things includes both. The canoes were raised by a rise taking place since the time of the Romans. He says, page 48, "Mr. John Buchanan, a zealous antiquary, writing in 1855, informs us, that in the course of the eighty years preceding that date, no less than seventeen canoes had been dug out of the estuarine silt of the Clyde at Glasgow, and that he had personally inspected a large number of them before they were exhumed. Five of them lay buried in silt under the streets of Glasgow, one in a vertical position with the prow uppermost as if it had sunk in a storm. Twelve other canoes were found about a hundred yards back from the river, at the average depth of about nineteen feet from the surface of the soil, or seven feet above high-water mark; but a few of them were only four or five feet deep, and consequently more than twenty feet above sea-level. In one of the canoes, a beautifully polished celt or axe of green stone was found."
103 The only thing proved by these data is that they were sunk before the upheaval, perhaps at different times, but we have only a proof, as far as it goes, that in the time of Antonine it had not taken place. The boats might be of a date subsequent to the Romans, only it is to be supposed the different degrees of rudeness marked different dates. But it is just as probable that it took place by the introduction of Roman skill as not. Stags' horns were used for the whale harpoons. And the utmost effort of prolongation only brings the most ancient to 3,400, that is - be it so - the time of the Exodus! But we get another important point here. If this be so, the Stone implement things are not older, perhaps not half as old. Some were 20 feet above the now sea-level, and five feet in sand. Their covering of five feet cannot have taken centuries - they would have rolled. The sand they are in was at the surface - about the year 500 after Christ ("fifteen centuries before our era," he says) they were five feet under it. But we have no proof that they had been even 500 years there. But this is "the Stone-period"!
As regards stone hatchets, etc., consult Rawlinson's Ancient Monarchies, vol. 1, p. 119, etc. - the plainest proof of the near following of stone and bronze. It is exactly the same as in Europe, perhaps in the then extreme North more rude. And the Swiss remains at Pfahlbauten plainly prove the whole system, and even animals, in great part, to have come from the East.
His data as to Norway are without any solid foundation. In the north it takes "a century for five feet," he says. So he strikes a mean of two and a half feet and concludes 24,000 years. But who says that it was always equal, or always the same from north to south? He says, page 58, "The upward movement now in progress in parts of Norway and Sweden, extends throughout an area of 1,000 miles north and south, and for an unknown distance east and west, the amount of elevation always increasing as we proceed towards the North Cape, where it is said to equal five feet in a century. A mean rate of continuous vertical elevation of two and a half feet in a century would, I conceive, be a high average; yet even if this be assumed, it would require 24,000 years for parts of the sea coast of Norway to attain the height of 600 feet." All this is vague and uncertain to the last degree.
The caves in France confessedly prove nothing. With Desnoyer's facts this goes really further. Sir C. Lyell says, page 62, "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." Yes, indeed! But Dr. Schmerling's caves, near Liege, are alleged, but this is only more valid because it is alleged that the drainage system must have changed since the bones came there. They have been washed in, so that in themselves they give no evidence. He says, p. 73, "The great alterations which have taken place in the shape of the valley of the Meuse and some of its tributaries are often demonstrated by the abrupt manner in which the mouths of fossiliferous caverns open in the face of perpendicular precipices 200 feet or more in height above the present streams." "It is more than probable that the rate of change was once far more active than it is now in the basin of the Meuse. Some of the nearest volcanoes, namely, those of the lower Eifel about sixty miles to the eastward, seem to have been in eruption in post-pliocene times, and may perhaps have been connected and co-eval with repeated risings or sinkings of the land in the Liege district." Now this change of valley system is attributed to earthquakes and volcanoes - when these were, we cannot tell - supposing the Deluge had nothing to do with it.
104 As regards the skulls, it is simply evident that they prove nothing. The skulls are some as good, some less so, than ordinary European skulls. Page 65. "One skull, that of a young person, was embedded by the side of a mammoth's tooth. Another skull, that of an adult individual, was buried five feet deep with the tooth of a rhinoceros, several bones of a horse, and some of the reindeer," etc. The Australian gives the same differences living at the same time. All this is operose nihil agendo. It proves that Professor Huxley, in spite of facts, thinks that the monkey-like men are to be looked for farther before Elephas primigenius than that is from us. But he is a regular low Linnaeist. He says, page 89, "Finally, the comparatively large cranial capacity of the Naeanderthal skull, overlaid though it may be by pithecoid bony walls, and the completely human proportions of the accompanying limb-bones, together with the very fair development of the Engis skull, clearly indicate that the first traces of the primordial stock whence man has proceeded need no longer be sought, by those who entertain any form of the doctrine of progressive development, in the newest tertiaries; but that they may be looked for in an epoch more distant from the age of the Elephas primigenius than that is from us." But it proves that skulls that are found prove nothing - that like the Nile valley creatures, so man was the same.
105 He says, "The enormous extent of the time over which our knowledge of man now extends." But the proofs as yet go the other way. The only point made, not yet proved, is (Tournal and Christol, south of France) that the mammoth, etc., are found with human remains in undisturbed alluvium; page 59, "Whether the animals enumerated by M. Tournal might not all of them be referred to quadrupeds which are known to have been living in Europe in the historical period seems doubtful."
As regards the bog and peat, it is all idle to judge of the period it takes in the way it has been done. It is the fashion to make the time long. If there were no water it would not grow. If there were, and trees fell as was the case here, it would, I am satisfied, make a very deep mass in fifty years. Next, in the Somme valley, the present was pretty much scooped out. But we get similar deposits fifty feet higher with the same remains. So that geology is at fault here, and its conclusions are necessarily called in question. Page 94. "M. Boucher de Perthes styled these older stone tools antediluvian, because they came from the lowest beds of a series of ancient alluvial strata bordering the valley of the Somme, which geologists had termed diluvium." They were found with bones "twenty or thirty-five feet in depth, in repairing the fortifications of Abbeville." "Thirty miles from Abbeville he found precisely the same in rudeness of make, and the same in geological position, about ninety feet above the river," page 96.
In the Brixham cave the bones, etc., were all "floated in," and, it is stated, when the stream was very much higher. But the flood may very likely have scooped it out here. The only alleged fact is the finding of the "limb of a cave-bear" at Brixham, and a rhinoceros leg-bone near Abbeville, but the mammoth in Silurian is a proof that such may have been long preserved - for ages - and if so, the stream or flood, which filled the cave, may have brought it in in that state. The time of the extinction of the animals too remains unascertained. It is certain their remains, at least of Elephas primigenius, with flesh, skin and hair, so as to be eaten, have been preserved to our days.
106 At Amiens the flints and bones were about 150 feet above the river at Abbeville - the same strata as there, and the same remains. Now this throws all in doubt as to the whole theory of the formation and remains. How come they (the same) at such different altitudes? Could the alleged system of formation be true? The sea had never gained there. Geologists, we are told, have discussed which is most ancient at Abbeville. But if more ancient, how do the strata and contents prove a date when they are the same? This is tripped lightly over with "the history of the valley marking," etc.
The gravel where the molar of Elephas antiquus, if it be so, was found, was only supposed to be a continuation of the same deposit, and referred to human period because of so low a level. At St. Acheul, in this 150 feet high formation, it is not said what elephant's tooth was found, i.e., primigenius or antiquus - the whole molar was primigenius. He says, "In the gravel, at Montiers, Mr. Prestwich and I found some flint knives. Some of these knives were taken from so low a level as to satisfy us that this great bed of gravel at Montiers, as well as that of the contiguous quarries of St. Roch, which seems to be a continuation of the same deposit, may be referred to the human period." "Among the elephant remains from St. Acheul, in M. Garnier's collection, Dr. Falconer recognised a molar of Elephas antiquus, the same species which has been already mentioned as having been found in the lower level gravels of St. Roch. Assuming the lower level gravel to be the newer, it follows that the Elephas antiquus and the hippopotamus of St. Roch continued to flourish long after the introduction of the mammoth, a well characterised tooth of which, as I before stated, was found at St. Acheul at the time of my visit in 1860" (page 143).
He says, "It is certain that ground-ice plays an active part every winter in giving motion to stones and gravel in beds of rivers in European Russia and Siberia. It appears that when in those countries the streams are reduced nearly to the freezing point, congelation begins frequently at the bottom; the reason being, according to Arago, that the current is slowest there. Fragments of such ice rising occasionally to the surface, bring up with them gravel, and even large stones." At St. Acheul we have proofs of ice, so that the Siberian case applies directly. There is no proof, in the fact of their entering, that the legs, before referred to, might not have been washed in now. Their separation from the body proves partial previous dislocation - it is probable that when it was cold on the Somme the gulf stream came by to melt, and it was cold at Brixham too - if separated as now.
107 Further the flint instruments are the same as far as appears - no progress, as elsewhere, according to Sir C. Lyell, for many, many thousands of years - longer before the peat than after. Elephas antiquus is found on high as well as on low lands, but flints not above 100, i.e., 150 feet above sea level. But why not higher, if rain had been there, and they dropped in? "Ice-chisels, flint hatchets, and spear-heads may have slipped accidentally through holes in the ice, and inevitably swept away with gravel on the breaking up of ice in the spring"!
Chapter 9. The only remark I have to make as to the Seine and Oise, which is all vague enough is, that Elephas primigenius and Elephas antiquus and Bos moschatus are all found there - that the latter still exists, and Elephas primigenius has been found with flesh, hair, etc., on, preserved in ice. So that the subsistence of man with them in itself proves nothing. The utmost is the negative evidence of Elephas ant. not having been generally found in late strata. But it is found with Elephas prim. and Bos mosch. Indeed, when human bones have not been found with El. ant. but only with El. prim., which proves nothing, the only ground of proof is the sameness of the deposit. But Sir C. Lyell admits so little examination has taken place, that they cannot "speculate with confidence" on the "sameness of date," page 152. Now this is everything. That the human bones and flint hatchets are there, is very possible - they may probably be so - but then it is not even said that El. ant. was in either locality, nor have we any proof that gravel of the same kind is of the same date. Nay, according to Lyell himself, "sandpits in two adjoining fields, as at Brentford and Ilford, may be separated by thousands of years, yet the same deposit" (page 159) "each containing distinct species of elephant and rhinoceros." But note, these same distinct species are found in one deposit, as "near Chauny and Noyon, besides reindeer, horse, and the musk buffaloe." I only ask, what possible proof have we here of date, from deposit or animal remains?
108 But there are greater difficulties in the way of geological chronology. At Biddenham, two miles from Bedford, we have "higher level gravel, at Bedford lower level gravel." Both very long after the glacial period, both "boulder clay or drift, and Oolite have been cut through." But in the lower and newer we have Elephas ant., and in the higher and older (perhaps it is argued elsewhere, thousands of years, to make man date far back) Elephas prim. and different shells from the lower. Thus the ground taken, for relative dates, from position and remains is totally subverted, or the presence of these extinct mammalia, etc., proves nothing at all. All Sir C. Lyell says on this is, "But we have scarcely as yet sufficient data to enable us to determine the relative age of these strata."
Chapter 10, page 173. He says, "The discovery of the most importance, is the occurrence in a newly discovered cave in Glamorganshire, called Long Hole, of the remains of two species of rhinoceros, in an undisturbed deposit, in the lower part of which were some well-shaped flint knives, evidently of human workmanship. It is clear from their position that man was coeval with these two species." When he speaks of "undisturbed deposit" in the Long Hole cave, it is merely undisturbed in the cave. Nor does he say why "it is clear" that man was coeval. All has been washed in as far as is known at any rate in other caves, and it is not stated to be known in this. In this cave relative position proves nothing. This is "certainly" it is said, "coeval with man." Now, in the same account, the "marine shells strewed above," prove "submergence and subsequent upheaval," so that their undisturbed character is more than doubtful. It may have been quietly, as observed elsewhere, but the state of things is all left vague.
Again page 175. "No proofs seem yet to have been found of the existence of man at the period when the hippopotamus and Elephas ant. flourished at San Ciro. There is another cave called the Grotto di Maccagnone, which much resembles it in geological position, on the opposite or west side of the Bay of Palermo, near Carini. In the bottom of this cave a bone deposit like that of San Ciro occurs, and above it other materials reaching to the roof. In this upper and newer breccia Dr. Falconer discovered flint knives, bone splinters, bits of charcoal, burnt clay and other objects indicating human intervention, mingled with entire land shells, teeth of horses, coprolites of hyena, and other bones, the whole agglutinated to one another and to the roof," etc. Now in the Grotto di Maccagnone there is a bone deposit the same as San Ciro, where Elephas ant. occurs, and in a "newer breccia," as we are told, flint knives, charcoal, burnt clay, etc., are found. Heretofore Elephas ant. was found "coeval with man," i.e., with flint knives, etc. - here they are posterior! And note, it is all washed in "tranquilly" it is said, which is strange, but be it so; but the dates of time are uncertain where the knives are in a subsequent formation.
109 Page 177. As to Sardinia all is too vague to ascertain what the facts are - I do not even understand it. He says, "In the vegetable soil covering the upraised marine stratum, with the older works of art fragments of Roman pottery occur." Are the older works of art in the vegetable soil then? If so, all is confusion and uncertain. Assuming 21.5 feet in a century is all supposition, without any ground whatever. It varies ad infinitum.
Page 183. The cavern of Aurignac proves absolutely nothing. He says, "It was almost filled with bones, among which were two entire skulls, which he recognised at once as human. The Mayor ascertained by counting the homologous bones that they must have formed parts of no less than seventeen skeletons of both sexes, and all ages; some so young that the ossification of some of the bones was incomplete. Scattered through the same ashes and earth were the bones of the following species of animals: cave-bear, brown bear, badger, polecat, cave-lion, wild cat, cave-hyena, wolf, fox, mammoth (two molars), rhinoceros, horse, ass, pig, stag, Irish deer, roebuck, reindeer, aurochs" (European bison). The animals that are there exist, some of them, now, as remarked already, formed with flesh, skin and hair on in ice. You have not even Elephas ant. No one can say the animals may not have been extinct in even historic times. But, though it looks like a burying place, all seems to me a little uncertain. There are seventeen persons, some infants, and about seventy animals, supposed eaten, some as big as elephants and aurochs, and a great depth of charcoal and cinders, and then the bones in some two feet of earth, not the debris of the rock. The style of sculpture is not met, as is evident. It is alleged that there is no proof that the persons buried at Abbeville, etc., had none. But if so, in the style of sculpture there is no proof of date.
M. Lartet speaks of the period of aurochs and finer instruments. He says "in the period of aurochs, a quadruped which survived the reindeer in the south of France, there are bone instruments of a still more advanced state of the arts," but from twelve to fifteen aurochs were found in Aurignac. But another difficulty comes in which shows how utterly uncertain their dates and theories are. The aurochs in Switzerland, where there are no reindeer, abound in lake dwellings, so that here reindeer is before aurochs. But "reindeer are found in the Mount Saleve" (Savoy, near Geneva), which is more ancient than lake-dwellings. In Aurignac we have plenty of both. But reindeer are "found exclusively at Savigne," with an "advanced state of art," and "still more advanced with aurochs at Massat"! "According to this view," says Lyell, page 191, "the mammalian fauna has undergone at least two fluctuations since the remains of some extinct quadrupeds were eaten and others buried at Aurignac." What does he mean? Did races re-appear after extinction? Who ever heard of that? Is it not a total uncertainty of data?
110 Chapter 11. We now come to "the fossil man of Denise comprising the remains of more than one skeleton, found in a volcanic breccia near the town of Le Puy-en-Velay, in Central France." Now the fossil man of Denise is "not beyond Elephas prim." so we have advanced nothing here. Besides the questionableness of the remains, for there was confessedly no rock of the kind in the place, it was alleged to be found by the person who pretended to have found it - "A peasant related to us how he had dug out the specimen with his own hands and in his own vineyard, not far from the summit of the volcano. I employed a labourer to make under his directions some fresh excavations, but all without success."
It is admitted that the Natchez bone, on the bank of the Mississippi proves no more than Abbeville (page 203), and no one can say out of what strata it really came.
Chapter 12. "If the reader remembers what was stated as to the absence or extreme scarcity of human bones and works of art in all strata, whether marine or freshwater, even in those formed in the immediate proximity of land inhabited by millions of human beings, he will be prepared for the general dearth of human memorials in glacial formations. It is natural therefore to encounter a gap in the regular sequence of geological monuments bearing on the past history of Man, wherever we have proofs of glacial action having prevailed with intensity." Now there is no reason why there should be any stoppage of the human remains by the glacial period, more than of animal remains. The abundance of reptile remains in the reptile age shows preservation of fragile fossils, or with Elephas meridionalis.
111 But the whole theory of glacial deposits, which I do not controvert, seems extremely obscure. "Moraines, or mounds of unstratified earth and stones," I can easily understand. Boulder stones, local patches of considerable size where the ice moves. But I read, as in connection with Biddenham gravel-pit, "the boulder clay extends for miles in all directions, and it seems to be 30 or 40 feet thick." How did ice bring this? I do not see at all why the Flood may not have formed often the new drainage system, by which for example the difference of age of the valley of Elephas merid. and Elephas prim. or ant. is proved by Lyell, and thus show the new drainage system where the traits are proved to be subsequent. In Cromer cliffs (page 213) the boulder clay is stated to be from "twenty to eighty feet in thickness." How did ice bring this?
Page 231. "In those regions where glaciers reach the sea, and where large masses of ice break off and float away, moraines may be transported to indefinite distances, and may be deposited on the bottom of the sea wherever the ice happens to melt. If the liquefaction take place when the berg has run aground and is stationary, and if there be no current, the heap of angular and rounded stones, mixed with sand and mud, may fall to the bottom in an unstratified form called 'till' in Scotland, and which has been shown to abound in the Norfolk cliffs." Note "The glacial furrows do not follow the present smaller furrows in Norway," etc. When and where were these formed? Along the Baltic there are "hundreds of miles of boulder." In Scotland the ice furrows follow the present drainage, "always," it is said, "principal but not minor." Why - unless a great flood?
Page 250. "A single elephant's tusk was found in the unstratified drift of the Valley of the Forth in so fresh a state than an ivory turner purchased it and turned part of it into chessmen. The remainder still preserved in the Edinburgh museum shrunk considerably. This boulder clay, under the name of 'the old alluvial cover' is sometimes one hundred and sixty feet thick, and passes for no less than twenty-eight miles almost continuously through the Union Canal." Now what ice brought all this? Elephants' tusks found in it so fresh as to be turned for ivory chessmen - shrunk when in the Museum! "Deers' horns in six feet of clay under boulder"! All this is very unsatisfactory. Partial depositions and pushings by a glacier I understand, but twenty-eight miles is strange, reaching 160 feet deep by a glacier, and where did the elephant's tusk come from? Say it tumbled in - when?
112 Page 264. "Mr. Jamieson after making several measurements with a spirit level, has been led to suspect a rise in the lowest shelf of the Parallel road in Glen Spean of one foot in a mile from west to east." If the parallel road rises, either it was not a lake or the county has risen.
Note, near Ballymena in 1863, four feet down in a bog, a roll of butter in a fibrous envelope, become somewhat like cheese in consistency, was found, and a flint arrow-head near it!
Note too "Marine shells were found in Wales, 1,392 feet above the sea, but drift of the same character 2,300 feet." If this was submergence, why no shells for the last 1,000 feet? "All the system of fauna and flora" is merely tacitly taking up Darwin's system. As to epochs or their length, all is absolutely conjectural. His 21.5 feet in a century is gathered from present changes and, even so, questionable, but that analogy demonstratively wrong, because, where we have proofs of action from the same causes, they are incomparably greater in result, as the Alps, Pyrenees, Andes, Himalayas, etc. No such mountains are ever formed now, admitting sinking and rising. My impression is that there are rocks polished and striated on the Jura above Neuchatel. He says, page 272, "Above 2,500 feet the rocks are rough, and not smoothed as if by ice." Again "The Chilian Andes are overspread with recent marine shells, showing an upheaval of the land during a very modern period."
As to man we are not without data. We trace back his history and civilization to historical and traditional times, and now we are called on, by Sir C. Lyell, to believe that for, say 'thousands of centuries before,' he remained practically an unimproving animal, and this on data of the loosest kind.
Page 312. In his answer to Professor Ramsay, citing the Lake of Geneva, he says, "Had it been the work of ice, it would have been prolonged from the termination of the upper valley of the Rhone towards the Jura." This I question, for the mountains would have turned it - Mount Pelifrier and the Jorat - and to the right far higher and more massive ones. The Gruyere mountains are left out in Sir C. Lyell's map, page 299. So on the left of the Rhone the mountains come into the Lake. They are so steep too that, unless in the valley where Valais and Savoy divide, I should doubt there being boulders at all till near Evian. This rather tends to make more points questionable. Sir C. Lyell surely did not know the ground.
113 Page 315. "At Durnten, on the Lake of Zurich, many organic remains came to light. Among these are the teeth of Elephas ant., the wild bull and red deer." I cannot conceive what the proof of antiquity from Elephas ant. is, where existing animals, or animals existing within historic times are also found. It may have been the first to perish, but we have no proof when.
Page 320. "According to M. Morlot, there was a period when the ice was in its greatest excess, when the glacier of the Rhone not only reached the Jura, but climbed to the height of 2,015 feet above the lake of Neuchatel, and 3,450 above the sea, at which time the Alpine ice actually entered the French territory at some points, penetrating by certain gorges, as through the defile at Fort de l'Ecluse, among others. The geological formations are evidently due to the action of rivers, swollen by the melting ice, by which the materials of parts of the old moraines were rearranged and stratified, and left usually at considerable heights above the level of the present valley plains." Lyell's theory from M. Morlot here, leaves no room for the lake of Geneva having been formed. If the ground at Fort de l'Ecluse had risen, as he speaks of, then the lake might have been formed, or if the Alps subsided and it did not. But this does not answer his theory, because the subsidence was not a glacial but a melting period. Yet the hard rock of the Jura at Fort de l'Ecluse might have done this, as compared with the lake of Geneva!
To have men at the delta of la Tiniere, and a glacier at Morges is a mahrchen (tale, legend). M. Morlot "supposes 10,000 years for the Tiniere delta," page 321. (There must be some blunder in chapter 2, where we have "age.") Is that duration of deposition? If so, it supposes men to be absolutely stationary for 7,000 years, or from 5,000 to 7,000 years. If it be duration, it is 9,800 or 12,000. He says "At the height of 150 feet above the lake, following up the course of the same torrent, we came to a more ancient delta, about ten times as large, which is therefore supposed to be the monument of about ten times as many centuries, or 100,000 years … and might perhaps correspond with the era when man and the Elephas prim. flourished together; but no human remains or works of art have as yet been found in deposits of this age"! Wherever can it be? I thought I knew the country. It is "ten times as thick" - "the Roman the same," so that we have 98,200 years for two dates of men's progress, and if proportionately, and that is the assumption, 3 to 5, or 4 to 7, say 38,000 roughly, during which man "flourished with flint instruments of the rudest kind"! Only they have not been found! There is nothing like going far enough. If it be taken as one whole, not divided as the lower la Tiniere, we have man 100,000 years in the same state, unimproved! How all history denies this, I need not say. Where such might be alleged of some thousand years, others have pushed them out.
114 I do not understand these "delta up to the Grande Eau." The Rhone valley has mountains descending, precipitously, right down into the morass of the plain of the river. Slight torrents tumble down the rocks. At Yvorne it first recedes - perhaps the rise there is what he refers to. But no stream here has to do with "a delta near Villeneuve." I have no idea what he refers to.
Chapter 16. I doubt about the whole glacial theory, but the statements connected with "Loess" are absurd. He says "certain loamy deposits, commonly called 'Loess.'" "At the time of the greatest extension of the Swiss glaciers, the Lake of Constance, and all other great lakes, were filled with ice, so that gravel and mud could pass freely from the upper Alpine valley of the Rhine, to the lower region between Basle and the sea, and could always have passed without obstruction, even after the ice had melted." If the Lake of Constance was filled with ice, it is perfectly ridiculous to speak of gravel and mud travelling on the top of it, or on the bottom of it. It rolls off the hill-sides, and goes down with the glacier. That any one can see. But as to its going on below Basle, it is absurd. The water may carry mud, as to mud, "800 feet deep and upwards." The river would have been over Basle and all Alsace, and I know not where else! But "moraines" there could not have been. And note, not only "800 feet thick," but "1,600 high above the sea, covering the Kaisersthal"!
115 The subsidence of the Alps it was brought the mud below Basle, 1,600 feet above the level of the sea, i.e., the river Rhine must then have been more than 1,600 feet higher than now. This descends to about 600 feet around Brussels. He says, "The loess envelopes Hainault, Brabant, and Limburg like a mantle, everywhere uniform and homogeneous in character, filling up the lower depressions of the Ardennes, and passing thence into the north of France, though not crossing into England. It is found on high plateaus, 600 feet above some of the. rivers, such as the Marne; but as we go southwards and eastwards to the basin of the Seine, it diminishes in quantity, and finally thins out in those directions." "If we ascend the basin of the Neckar, we find that it is filled with loess of great thickness, far above its junction with the Rhine." What kind of waterfall then had it into the sea? It is 600 feet high near the Marne, crosses from Belgium to near Dunkirk, and does not come to England! It is not the first glacial period - then it was "continuous land far out north and west," they say (chap. 14). If it had been the time of submergence, the sea would have flowed up the valleys. It is not the second continental state, for then the land was higher and stretched out farther than ever, and it is said the Thames ran into the Rhine, "Ireland, England, and the Continent being united, the Thames was a tributary of the Rhine," page 274.
In the last state, marine shells are found at, say 30 feet above the sea. But when was the loess deposited 1,600 feet high, and "far higher in Hungary"? The whole thing is incredible. Belgium, and on to Dunkirk was a "kind of delta," yet hundreds of feet high! And the Rhine has scooped out at least 800 feet while sinking continually at the mountain end. Where is the loess on lower ground there than the Kaisersthal over Switzerland and the borders of the Rhine? It is, as the French say, "a myth." Some other flood may have done it, gradually sinking in the present drainage system. But this system supposes the Rhine valley to have existed, and to have filled up 300 feet at Brussels and 1,600 feet at Kaisersthal. Yet, he says, "the upper valley of the Neckar has Neckar-mud," when Rhine mud was 1,600 feet high, and Danube mud vastly higher - as if the Rhine mud would not have been there! He says "in the higher parts of the basin of the Danube, loess of the same character as that of the Rhine, attains a far greater elevation above the sea than any deposits of Rhenish loess."
116 They talk of levels, "grand oscillations in the level of the land - changes analogous to those on which we have been led to speculate when endeavouring to solve the various problems presented by the glacial phenomena, to account for the nature and geological distribution of the loess." But the supposition is a regular descent from the Alps to Brussels and Dunkirk. There was no Rhine mud at Tubingen in the basin of the Neckar, but there was Rhine mud at Kaisersthal - with the same drainage system; note, at Heidelberg it is 800 feet above the Neckar! "Southward and eastward of the Seine it thins out," query as to this. The Ganges is no case in point. Page 337. "The sediment thrown down by the Ganges had accumulated at a sufficient rate to prevent the sea from invading that region." It had subsided at the sea-end so that the mud conveyed has filled it up! Of this I see no proof, because if the sea had been that depth there it might gradually fill up, and the water be unfit for marine molluscs.
The loess I dismiss as a system of absurd theory, and far more like the Deluge than anything else. Hence also the "Maestrecht jaw, found 19 feet from the surface, and the Hocht remains of leaves, nuts, fresh-water shells and a human skull," as to which facts fail, as here, but which are avowedly of a much later date.
After all, they conjecture 4,000 to 7,000 years for even the Stone-period. He says, page 373, "An antiquity of 7,000 years at least must be assigned to the oldest of these remains. Between the newer or recent division of the Stone period and the older division, which has been called the Post-pliocene, there was evidently a vast interval of time - a gap in the history of the past, into which many monuments of intermediate date will one day have to be intercalated. Of this kind are the cave in the South of France, in which M. Lartet has lately found bones of the reindeer, associated with works of art more advanced in style than those of St. Acheul or of Aurignac." This is all unintelligible. He intercalates between the recent and the older stone implements more advanced than those of Aurignac.
But to return, page 367, he says, "The numerous plants which are common to the temperate zones N. and S. of the equator have been referred by Mr. Darwin and Dr. Hooker to migrations, which took place along mountain chains running from N. to S., during some of the colder phases of the glacial epoch. Such an hypothesis enables us to dispense with the doctrine that the same species ever originated independently in two distinct and distant areas, if we admit the doctrine of the co-existence of meridional belts of warmer and colder climate, instead of the simultaneous prevalence of extreme cold both in the eastern and western hemisphere." The migration of plants and fauna is only Darwin-theory. Why may they not have been original in Great Britain? The fancy of a cold range across the equator, to have like plants in both tropics according to Dr. Hooker, is a mere dream.
117 As I have already suggested, they are obliged to suppose that the state of the arts remained stationary for almost indefinite periods, so that even the system of river drainage was wholly altered. But he is totally wrong, and Sir Geo. Cornewall Lewis too, as to his Assyrian and Egyptian dates. He says, "Taking into consideration all the evidence respecting the buildings and great works of Egypt extant in the time of Herodotus, we may come to the conclusion that there is no sufficient ground for placing them at a date anterior to the building of the temple of Solomon, or 1,012 B.C." Berosus goes much farther back, 2,234 B.C. This statement as to Egypt is ridiculous. It is useless to notice his ignorance of history in receiving Hanno by an Egyptian king, or refer to conjectural dates connected with it. Suffice it to say he contradicts himself as to dates and delta-remains both in chapter 3. There it is estimated, though these computations are really all nonsense, at 12,000 and 30,000 years, and the flint at 4,000 to 7,000 years, and on upwards. Yet the bones found with them are not found in the delta, and hence the deltas are much more modern, i.e., 12,000 to 30,000 more modern than 4,000 to 7,000 years and upwards. And this is science! He says, "Were we to assume the increase of Nile mud to six inches in a century, the burnt brick met with at a depth of sixty feet would be 12,000 years old. Another fragment was found seventy-two feet deep. Were we to take two and a half inches, it must have been buried more than 30,000 years ago." "Assuming the Roman period to represent an antiquity of from sixteen to eighteen centuries, M. Marlot assigns the oldest layer, that of the Stone-period, an age of from 5,000 to 7,000 years."
Chapter 20. "In pictures on the walls of ancient temples in Egypt, a thousand years or more before the Christian era, the negro and Caucasian physiognomies were portrayed as faithfully, and in as strong contrast as if the likeness of their races had been taken yesterday. I have remarked upon the slight modification the negro has undergone, after having been transported from the tropics, and settled for more than two centuries in the temperate climate of Virginia." I do not see, if the negro do not change at all in a temperate climate, and that their physiognomy is exactly the same in Egyptian monuments as now alleged by these race settlers, what "lapse of time" can do. There must have been some other cause than change of climate and lapse of time. Yet he says, "So long as physiologists continued to believe that man had not existed on the earth above six thousand years, they might, with good reason, withhold their assent from the doctrine of a unity of origin of so many distinct races; but the difficulty becomes less and less, exactly in proportion as we enlarge our ideas of the lapse of time during which different communities may have spread slowly, and become isolated, each exposed for ages to a peculiar set of conditions, whether of temperature, or food, or danger, or ways of living." How long then did it take to make a rock pigeon a fantail or a pouter? It is always to be remembered that we have history, and tradition of men which gives the race an ordered history to a beginning, and these speculations are in the teeth of it; while their long dates there are facts to disprove - such as trees in alleged strata of thousands of years, which prove they were laid there at once The whole thing is a decided failure.
118 Page 386. "But when they had gradually penetrated to remote regions by land or water - drifted sometimes by storms and currents in canoes to an unknown shore - barriers of mountains, deserts, or seas, which oppose no obstacle to mutual intercourse between civilised nations, would ensure the complete isolation for tens or thousands of centuries of tribes in a primitive state of barbarism." First, it is quite simple that what carried them there first, the obstacle having been no sufficient hindrance, would carry them there again. Next, it is contrary to fact, as it is perfectly well known that the pressure of nations was constant, onward, one after another. It is the history of man. Next it supposes that no part would grow civilised, and have means deliberately organised to overcome the obstacles. All the history we have, i.e., all the facts, as does common sense, refute this as having neither facts nor common sense for its foundation.
119 Page 388. "In the very outset of our enquiry, we are met with the difficulty of defining what we mean by the terms 'species' and 'race.' Lamarck proposed it should run thus: 'a species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary.'" The definition of "species" presents no difficulty to my mind. It is that which by regular propagation reproduces itself. How far varieties in a species may be the will of God, and so ordered in nature that they may multiply intermediate forms, is a mere matter of fact, or how far circumstances of climate, or other such, may modify or destroy a species. But where there is continuous reproduction I find a species or kind.
"All resembling each other" is really added to make confusion, because it is a question how far the resemblance is to go. Thus, should cows have horns or not? There may be constant unchangeable features, others seemingly as important, which are not. This is a matter to learn, but where the "seed is in itself, after its kind," I get a species OR race, i.e., the like produced by generation. All the rest, such as "varying their forms," as Lamarck does, throws it on what was changeable and uncertain, and is no criterion at all, so as to lose the form of the true part. It may be convenient for men's bookclassification - a mere arrangement for memory, and each student vary it - but it has nothing to do with the reality of the matter, and hence, as we see, every man has his own arrangements. The progress IS, though not uniform, for the finest reptiles were first formed, and, I think, as perfect fishes, so as to upset Lamarck's notion, yet as a general idea between distinct races true; but "evolving" essentially false. He says, "There has been a progressive advance from brute intelligence to the reasoning powers of man. The improvement in the grade of being, had been slow and continuous, and the human race itself was at length evolved out of the most highly organised and endowed out of the inferior mammalia!" What he imagined is not much matter - here is a sample of it, "By repeated acts of volition, animals might acquire new organs and attributes. In plants, which cannot exert a will of their own, certain subtle fluids or organising forces might operate so as to work out analogous effects"! He adds, "An indefinite lapse of ages."
120 Lamarck's believing in long periods makes amends, with Sir C. Lyell, for all his flaws - the flaws being that proof is wholly wanting. But long time enough may do nobody knows what - make, they tell us, a penguin's wing into a man's arm, that bird being a biped already! Why not? "Thirty or forty centuries are insignificant in the history of a species." How does he prove that? Because in more than that period, "thousands of centuries" if we are to believe Sir C. Lyell, "in the case of the reindeer, Elephas primigenius, and many living species," etc. But they have this significance according to Sir C. Lyell, that neither nature in all that period, nor art since it tried, has been able to produce two races, etc., or one new organ. Pretty strong significance of this at least - that the whole theory neglects facts and is founded on notions!
When he says "Time not being allowed," he is simply denying his own statements, because if time was allowed there would be then the pliancy he denies and not fixity. Nor is this all, as he denies catastrophes as producing "great revolutions of the earth's crust, and its inhabitants." Time, if any time conceivable (for he calls the period, "almost indefinite") would do, has been allowed. Yet species are dying out rather than changing. He says, page 394, "The manner in which some species are now becoming scarce and dying out, one after another, appeared to me to favour the doctrine of fixity of specific character, showing the want of pliancy and capability of varying, which ensured their annihilation whenever changes adverse to their well-being occurred; time not being allowed for such a transformation as might be conceived capable of adapting them to the new circumstances, and of converting them into what naturalists would call new species."
Page 396. "The historical development of the forms and functions of organic life during successive epochs, seems to mark a gradual evolution of creative power, manifested by a gradual ascent towards a higher type of being." "We can scarcely doubt that we should have already traced back the evidence much farther had not our enquiries been arrested by the vast gap between the tertiary and secondary formation." What is this "vast gap between secondary and tertiary" species? How comes the gap, if all is "gradual."
"The mammalia next in antiquity were, for the most part, diminutive, the two largest not much exceeding our common hedgehog and polecat in size, with one exception, the Stereognathus, which may have been a hoofed quadruped and placental, though, as we have only the lower jaw and teeth, and the molars are unlike any living type, such an opinion is hazarded with caution." After all, the discovered quadrupeds (unless perhaps Stereognathus, judged of from half a lower jaw with teeth unlike any) are low in proportion to their age. They are marsupials; so indeed I see he admits.
121 Page 405. "It may be thought almost paradoxical that writers who are most in favour of transmutation (Mr. C. Darwin, and Dr. J. Hooker, for example) are nevertheless among those who are most cautious in their mode of espousing the doctrine of progression."
The reason why Dr. Hooker and Mr. Darwin like transmutation and not progress is because there is nothing of God or of divine order in the former, and they fear the latter because there is order - tends to show an Orderer; transmutation merely arbitrary secondary causes. The progressionist does not, as Sir C. Lyell sees, look for leaps, nor reject them, but he sees in nature order and so finds God, even when he does not think much about Him. He believes in the order, because in the main he finds it. He sees nothing in transmutation but what is low, base and casual. There is another thing, a truthfully constituted mind rejects in it - the absence of proof, or rather the love of theory and man's mind against proofs which nature affords, as Sir C. Lyell admits. He says, "Transmutation, if adopted, will require us to hold that man himself has been derived by an unbroken line of descent from some one of the inferior animals."
Transmutation is a low, physical theory, forcing some feeble tendencies of nature in the face of the effect produced against it by what is universal else. Men see lusus naturae - big leaves in rich ground, poor plants in poor ground, and special causes of all kinds producing natural consequences, modifying ordinary states. This may produce varieties. But they know very well, elms produce elms, and pigs produce pigs, so of all the evidence they have, as Sir C. Lyell admits, and his thousand-century theories only confirm it. Hence a sound mind, a healthful mind supposes such an order, grows into it as a part of his nature formed by what he lives in the midst of, and by which rightly he must be formed. He finds men theorising on species making, and theorising on thousands of centuries to give time for his changes, which even so are belied by the facts possessed, even if there were thousands of centuries. Hence progressionists are indisposed to give up what has been formed in them by uniform evidence. The transmutationist wants to theorise, and the progress system makes folly of his theory, and he does not like it, that is all - of course he does not. No progress leads the progressionist to change one animal into another - that is transmutation. He holds to the truth of species because he sees and knows it is so. He believes it because it is written.
122 Page 410. "Lamarck, when speculating on the origin of the long neck of the giraffe, imagined that quadruped to have stretched himself up in order to reach the boughs of lofty trees, until by continued efforts, and longing to reach higher, he obtained an elongated neck. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace simply suppose that, in a season of scarcity, a long-necked variety, having the advantage in this respect over most of the herd, as being able to browse on foliage out of their reach, survived them, and transmitted its peculiarity of cervical conformation to its successors." How perfectly ridiculous all this is about giraffes! Who ever heard there were once short-necked giraffes? Or how came it that we have not long-necked gnus or antelopes from the same cause? All this is trash.
Page 411. "Every naturalist admits that there is a general tendency in animals and plants to vary; but it is usually taken for granted, though we have no means of proving the assumption to be true, that there are certain limits beyond which each species cannot pass under any circumstances, or in any number of generations. Mr. Darwin and Mr. Wallace say that the opposite hypothesis, which assumes that every species is capable of varying indefinitely from its original type, is not a whit more arbitrary, and has this manifest claim to be preferred, that it will account for a multitude of phenomena which the ordinary theory is incapable of explaining." When it is said "it is no more arbitrary" to suppose it may vary and make a new species, than to suppose it may not, the answer is in the paragraph which follows, "Should we find that a variable species can no longer be made to vary," it is ordinary human deduction to say it cannot. It has been tried under all known circumstances and it does not. To assume, "it might under more favourable circumstances, or if more time were allowed" is more arbitrary. All existing proof is that it does not - to assume it might is then more arbitrary than to believe it will not. But hybridisation is a strong proof against it, because out of the deduced species there is no propagation. God has made a manifested barrier, allowing sufficient to show it cannot go beyond its kind so as to form a species. When it is said "community of descent is the hidden bond" - naturalists looking for an unknown plan of creation - I do not know what wise men are seeking after, but every simple one believes in genealogical descent making species, and it is plainly stated in Genesis 1.
123 We must not confound the ascertaining of species by marks and the facts of species by genealogy. The forms determining species are mere guesses of science, whereas true species genealogically has its own constancy - it does not hybridise. Varieties may have been created, arise in many ways; forming species is another thing. Difference of forms is classification, not species. He says, page 439, "Among the fossils brought in 1858 by Mr. Hayden from the Niobrara valley in Nebraska, Dr. Leidy describes a rhinoceros so like the Asiatic species, that he at first referred it to the same, and, what is most singular, he remarks generally of the pliocene fauna of that part of North America, that it is far more related in character to the post-pliocene and recent fauna of Europe than to that now inhabiting the American continent." The fact of the pliocene fauna of Nebraska being more like the living European than American throws the whole matter into question - does not finally prove against any system but makes all doubtful.
Page 440. "We have already seen that a large proportion of the living quadrupeds of Amoorland (34 out of 48) are specifically identified with those at present inhabiting the continent of Europe and the British Isles. We usually know nothing of the geographical varieties of the post-pliocene and pliocene species, least of all, those successive changes of form which they must have undergone in the pre-glacial epoch between the upper miocene and post-pliocene eras."
Page 443. "If mammalia vary, upon the whole, at a more rapid rate than animals lower in the scale of being, it must not be supposed that they can alter their habits and structures readily, or that they are convertible in short periods into new species. Mr. Darwin observes that bats might have made their way to distant islands by flight, for they are often ma with on the wing far out at sea. I have found it difficult to reconcile the antiquity of certain islands, such as those of the Madeiran Archipelago, and those of still larger size in the Canaries, with the total absence of small indigenous quadrupeds." As to change of forms, and animals getting to islands I have no difficulty one way or another. The truth of species remains. No one doubts the existence of varieties, or that they may become more or less permanent.
124 Sir C. Lyell is superficial as a reasoner. Thus as to languages, Hindoos, etc., he says, quoting Professor Max Muller, page 455, "Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanscrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, old Slavonic, Gothic, and Armenian are eight varieties of one common and more ancient type, and no one of them could have been the original from which the others were borrowed. They have all such an amount of mutual resemblance, as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages. The people who spoke this unknown parent speech, of which so many other ancient tongues were offshoots, must have migrated at a remote era to widely separated regions of the old world, such as Northern Asia, Europe and India south of the Himalaya. The soundness of this Aryan hypothesis has been called in question on the ground that the Hindoos, Persians, Turks, Scandinavians, and other people referred to as having derived not only words but grammatical forms from an Aryan source, belong each of them to a distinct race, and all these races have, it is said, preserved their peculiar character unaltered from the earliest dawn of history and tradition." It is clear from all authorities they went to India and drove back the original inhabitants as far as the Deccan. In the south they are Turanian, in the north Aryan, save at the two extremities of the Himalayas. Persians are admittedly Zend through Pehlvi. Races are not the absolute question, as the modern Phoenicians preserved the Shemitic language of the former inhabitants but were Hamites. He says, "There can be no question that if we could trace back any set of cognate languages now existing to some common point of departure, they would converge and meet sooner in some era of the past than would the existing races of mankind; in other words, races change much more slowly than languages."
Page 469. "In our attempts to account for the origin of species, we find ourselves still sooner brought face to face with the working of a law of development of so high an order as to stand nearly in the same relation as the Deity Himself to man's finite understanding, a law capable of adding new and powerful causes, such as the moral and intellectual faculties of the human race, to a system of nature which had gone on for millions of years without the intervention of any analogous cause. If we confound 'Variation' or 'Natural Selection' with such creational laws, we deify secondary causes or immeasurably exaggerate their influence."
125 It is well Sir Charles Lyell recognises a law wholly above variation. But I judge he is astray as to language, America and savage Africa apart, of which we really know nothing. The great body of the human race is clearly subdivided into Semitic, Turanian and Aryan. His conclusion from language to organs is a non sequitur. He says, "If mankind began their career in a rude state of society, their whole vocabulary would be limited to a few words, and if they then separated into several isolated communities, each of these would soon acquire an entirely distinct language, some roots being lost and others corrupted and transformed beyond the possibility of subsequent identification, so that it might be hopeless to expect to trace back the living and dead languages to one starting point. In like manner it may be said of species, that if those first formed were of very simple structure, and they began to vary and to lose some organs by disuse and acquire new ones by development, they might soon differ as much as so many distinctly created primordial types." But when he supposes the possibility of "older strata than Cambrian containing organic remains," it is unphilosophical, because we descend, he admits, according to, in the main, a progressive system from man to the lowest mollusc or foraminifera - things long discussed whether plants or animals, i.e., to the lowest degree, i.e., it is to be supposed the bottom of animated life where it joins plants, page 442, "The foraminifera which exemplify the lowest stage of animal existence, being akin to sponges."
But he is very wide astray in saying "a law of development adds moral faculties." "Intellectual" - be it so; but "moral," I deny, because then God comes in, and an wholly other ground of judging. The moment I get God, and moral questions involve man's relationship with Him, I am on other ground. Science is out of court - it may prove a chimpanzee's hair to be like a man's, which is not the case - I say "very well." Tell me that a soul was "development by selection," I say, "you are out of court, that is not a question of science. You are denying what I know to be divine."
126 Page 472. He says, speaking of progression, "It cannot be denied that a theory which establishes a connection between the absence of all relics of vertebrata in the oldest fossiliferous rocks, and the presence of Man's remains in the newest, which affords a more than plausible explanation of the successive appearance in strata of intermediate age of the fish, reptile, bird and mamimfer, has no ordinary claims to our favour as comprehending the largest number of positive and negative facts gathered from all parts of the globe, and extending over countless ages, that science has perhaps ever attempted to embrace in one grand generalisation." Generalisation and progression are well in a general way as an order in creation with variation added, but when "progress" means "derivation," and that beasts are derived from birds - risum teneatis.
Page 474. "Linnaeus compared man and the apes, in the same manner as he compared these last with the carnivores, ruminants, rodents, or any other division of warm-blooded quadrupeds. After several modifications of his original scheme, he ended by placing man as one of the many genera in his order Primates, which embraced not only the apes and lemurs, but the bats also, as he found these last to be nearly allied to some of the lowest forms of the monkeys." Quoting from Professor Huxley, he says, "The gorilla's hand is clumsier, heavier, and has a thumb somewhat shorter in proportion than that of man; but no one has ever doubted its being a true hand. But the most cursory anatomical investigation at once proves, that the resemblance of the so-called 'hind-hand' to a true hand is only skin deep, and that, in all essential respects, the hind-limb of the gorilla is as truly terminated by a foot as that of man. The tarsal bones, in all important circumstances of number, disposition, and form, resemble those of man."
"The foot of Man is distinguished from his hand by -
"1. The arrangement of the tarsal bones.
"2. By having a short flexor and a short extensor-muscle of the digits.
"3. By possessing the muscle termed peronoeus longus."
"The hind-limb of the gorilla, therefore, ends in a true foot with a very movable great toe. It is a prehensile foot, if you will, but is in no sense a hand."
127 The whole of this reasoning on man and apes proves to me only the inclination of Sir C. Lyell and the Simianism of Professor Huxley, and the thoroughly low estimate of the whole lot. Anatomy may show flexors and extensors, etc., and make a hand, but anatomy is not everything, and a "prehensible foot" is not the least a human foot; the anatomy may prove growing analogies, but the end of formation is different. Of course an anatomist thinks anatomy conclusive.
The figures he gives prove the human brain different from the chimpanzee's in form. There may be a hippocampus minor and a posterior cornu of which nobody knows the use but the form as well as the size is quite different. And the figures of both views of the ape cannot be exact - the division of the posterior lobe in one would show the cerebellum which is not seen in the figure of the upper surface. But the forms of man and ape are quite different. He says, "The dissection of an ape, in 1861, fully bore out the existence both in the human and simian brain of the three characters exclusively appertaining to man, namely, the occipital or the posterior lobe, the hippocampus minor, and the posterior cornu."
But further, the discussion on the intelligence, etc., proves that infidelity descends to the brute and nothing else, and that Lyell approves this. Quoting from Professor Agassiz, he says, "The gradations of the moral faculties among the higher animals and man are, moreover, so imperceptible, that to deny to the first a certain sense of responsibility and consciousness, would certainly be an exaggeration of the difference between animals and man. There exists as much individuality within their respective capabilities among animals as among man. This argues strongly in favour of the existence in every animal of an immaterial principle, similar to that which, by its excellence and superior endowments, places man so much above animals." Who in the world ever doubted that man was an animal, that he had animal passions? "Yet the principle exists unquestionably, whether it be called soul, reason, or instinct." What Professor Agassiz says is ridiculous. He confesses that he "cannot say in what the mental faculties of a child differ from those of a young chimpanzee." He asks, "What is the difference between the two?" The answer is that the young child is capable of being a man, and the young chimpanzee remains a chimpanzee with a bigger body and more strength. He says, "The range of the passions of the animals is as extensive as that of the human mind" - be it so - that is man's animal part - a remark as old as Aristotle, and found in Scripture. The brute has a nephesh khay-yah (soul of life) Genesis 1:30, margin. When Professor Agassiz says, "The gradations of moral faculties are imperceptible," he only shows the state of his own. Man may be reduced to a low moral state, but an ape can never be elevated a step beyond his state of an ape. They speak of "responsibilities" - to whom? They can only in animals speak of those of fear, etc., as regards man, which may be found in man - but conscience towards God they cannot speak of. They reduce man to the animal soul - the psychical soul. The animal never goes beyond passions in his motives - man does. Even intellectually, as has been a hundred times observed, the animal's intelligence is, where not instinct, merely reasoning on means for the present meeting of its wants - a dog seeks the door - an elephant remembers, and connects money and sugar. But man has a creative intelligence within his sphere, so as to produce variety - acts on itself. Of this nothing is seen in the brute. Hence, even in common things, man makes progress on himself - the brute never. Assuming the ideas of these very stupid men, the progress is unconscious, and only material in the animal itself. A giraffe gets a long neck from stretching it in a famine! Did you ever see a man do that? No one denies a man is an animal with animal passions. All these men do is to reduce him to this, which is irrational. There is no sign that an animal refers to God, for we see his conduct governed by other motives; Professors Agassiz and Huxley perhaps do not either - that only proves they have degraded themselves - that, man is capable of doing; an animal not, save materially.
128 I am aware that Lyell quoting Quatrefages says, "Few, if any of the authors cited, underrate the enormous gap which separates man from the brutes." My answer is that on this very point Professor Agassiz has degraded himself by doing so, as is seen in the quotation already given from his "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of North America." He seeks to prove animals have a soul from it. Now Scripture itself states they have - but not that God breathed into their nostrils the breath of life, so that he became "a living soul."
Sir C. Lyell saves his distance further, and tells us Professor Agassiz has not intention to impugn these truths. He says "Professor Agassiz speaks of the existence in every animal of 'an immaterial principle similar to that which, by its excellence and superior endowment, places man so much above animals'; and he remarks, 'that most of the arguments of philosophy in favour of the immortality of man, apply equally to the permanency of this principle in other living beings.' The author has no intention by this remark to impugn the truth of the great doctrine referred to." This sparing what not only leaves out God but lowers man - for these wretched infidels are not aware that whatever leaves God out degrades man beyond measure of comparison, for his connection with God has a character which no personal powers can give more or less - this half-approving quotation of what really does so is dishonouring to Lyell himself. What immediately follows leads back to give the probability of a connection by transmutation between Simiae and man - but is he transmuted into connection with God? It is another order of ideas. He says "It is no doubt true that in both" (man and the lower animals) "the identity of the individual outlasts many changes of form and structure which take place during the passage from the infant to the adult state, and from that to old age, and the loss again and again of every particle of matter which had entered into the composition of the body during its growth, and the substitution of new elements in their place, while the individual remains always the same, carries the analogy a step farther."
129 Page 499. "Lund, a Danish naturalist, found in Brazil, not only extinct sloths and armadilloes, but extinct genera of fossil monkeys, but all of the American type, and, therefore, widely departing in their dentition and some other characters from the Primates of the old world. No sooner do we carry back our researches into miocene times, than we begin to discover fossil apes and monkeys north of the Alps and Pyrenees." Supposing fossil apes were found in the tropics, they must be lower than what we have, and would prove nothing. They could not be a progress towards man, for we have the next steps alive, unless it be alleged that man has supplanted the advanced apes and left others like them, but then the theory of the near analogy of the present ones fails. The whole is supposition. It is not progression.
There could not be a greater proof of ignoring what the soul is than the last pages of Sir C. Lyell's book. Quoting from Hallam's Literature of Europe he says, "Every link in the long chain of creation does not pass by easy transition into the next. There are necessary chasms, and, as it were, leaps from one creation to another, which, though not exceptions to the law of continuity, are accommodations of it to a new series of being. If man was made in the image of God, he was also made in the image of an ape. The framework of the body of him who has weighed the stars and made the lightning his slave, approaches to that of a speechless brute, who wanders in the forests of Sumatra. Thus standing on the frontier land between animal and angelic natures, what wonder that he should partake of both."
130 Sir C. Lyell himself then continues, "When we contemplate the many hundred millions of human beings who now people the earth, we behold thousands who are doomed to helpless imbecility, and we may trace an insensible gradation between them and the half-witted, and from these again to individuals of perfect understanding, so that tens of thousands must have existed in the course of ages, who in their moral and intellectual condition, have exhibited a passage from the irrational to the rational, or from the irresponsible to the responsible. One fourth of the human race die in early infancy, nearly one tenth before they are a month old, so that we may safely affirm that millions perish on the earth in every century, in the first few hours of their existence. To assign to such individuals their appropriate psychological place in the Creation, is one of the unprofitable themes on which theologians and metaphysicians have expended much ingenious speculation. The inventors of useful arts, the poets and philosophers of the early stages of the earth's growth, the promulgators of new systems of religion, ethics, and philosophy, or of new codes of law, have often been looked upon as messengers from heaven, and after their death have had divine honours paid to them, while fabulous tales have been told of the prodigies which accompanied their birth. Nor can we wonder that such notions have prevailed when we consider what important revolutions in the moral and intellectual world such leading spirits have brought about. If, in conformity with the theory of progression, we believe mankind to have risen slowly from a rude and humble starting point, such leaps may have successively introduced not only higher and higher forms and grades of intellect, but at a much remoter period may have cleared at one bound the space which separated the highest stage of the unprogressive intelligence of the inferior animals from the first and lowest form of improvable reason manifested by man."
131 And again "It may be said that, so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life - sensation - instinct - the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason - and lastly the improvable reason of man himself, presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter."
Sir Charles Lyell would fain appear more condescendingly religious, more unprejudiced by infidel science, and admit Archbishop Sumner's reasonings that "the power of progressive and improvable reason is man's peculiar and exclusive endowment," and be above religious men in the largeness in which he can allow philosophy, which, by the bye, is receding from the Socratic change to Cosmogony, but there never was a more, for himself, complete ignoring of the soul - the difference of an immortal soul in connection with God - than in this man.
Progression in God's plan of Creation there seems to be. The large variation of species is a question of fact and degree. Attempted definite classification by phenomena, whose definiteness is allowed to be equally necessary and false, has puzzled scientific men when species is in se plain enough. But he has not an idea beyond "transcendent genius" when his own thoughts come out - "dominion of mind over matter" - a leap in some extraordinary inventor, poet, or prophet" - "progress from unprogressive intelligence to improvable intelligence," but the possession of a soul which is, or is not to dwell with God, never crosses his mind - a difference greater, and of another order, than all the progress and all the leaps in the world. As an animal made for this world, to walk about, or to lay hold on trees, to build by instinct as a beaver or with art as a man, you may find points of progress ad infinitum, great as the difference of man is, and that difference connected with his having a soul, because improvable intelligence connects itself with moral will and lusts, obedience or self and self-satisfying desires. But the possession of a responsible soul having to say to heaven is a wholly different thing in its nature. As I have said, no one doubts the animal nature of man; his more or less likeness to an ape is all well for anatomists, but does not touch the real question or that of which there is no question - and that, Sir C. Lyell ignores. The soul which is the matter in question, if he is to talk of God and religion, he does not suppose the existence of in his own remarks. Now this is not philosophical, to avoid the only point really in question. If he says "this is a religious question, and science cannot treat it," then let science admit its incapacity to treat it. But be honest and own its incapability to treat more than what is material or at least animal, and leave such subjects; for to treat them and leave out the principal point is only its own shame.
132 I add a word as regards the delta of Egypt. I have not the details, but I do not see the force of the argument at all. He says: "The point of time to be ascertained, in every case where we find a monument buried to a certain depth, as at Memphis and Heliopolis, is the era when the city fell into such decay that the ancient embankments were neglected, and the river allowed to inundate the site of the temple, obelisk, or statue." Now, supposing the statue of Rameses not to have sunk at all, it is clear if it was solid ground, then there was a wide extent of delta for the mud to spread over, and it is as well known as necessary that the river, so spreading, leaves an incomparably smaller extent of mud than on the narrower ground. Nor is this all when the borings were made, it must have filled, originally, much faster, for the sea was shallower, and when the sea came up there the pottery was launched down the slope, pushed into the sea, and sank to the bottom. So that the depth proves nothing.
He says: "Were we to assume the deposit to be six inches in a century, the burnt brick met with at a depth of sixty feet would be 12,000 years old!" "If the boring was made where an arm of the river had been silted up at a time when the apex of the delta was somewhat farther south, or more distant from the sea than now, the brick in question might be comparatively very modern. The experiments instituted at the pedestal of the fallen statue of King Rameses at Memphis, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the age of a given thickness of Nile sediment, are held by some experienced Egyptologists not to be satisfactory, on the ground of the uncertainty of the rate of deposit accumulated at that locality. The point sought to be determined was the extra amount of Nile mud which had accumulated there since the time when that statue is supposed to have been erected." Moreover it is believed that the ground is sinking there, and this has to be taken into account. If this be so, till its quantity be estimated, no conclusion can be come to at all. On the whole, the entire theory seems an utter and complete failure. It shows the aim of the writers, their wish, and thus discredits their judgment. All the effects from skulls have issued in entire disproof of the theory - that is clear.
133 Note that Mr. Duckworth, of the Liverpool Geological Society, March 24th, 1861, having examined the drift lands at Amiens and Abbeville, says there is no evidence whatever of any slow or gradual formation; and the impression left upon his mind was that they have been produced by some sharp and sudden catastrophe.
Note also, Mr. Prestwich, of the Royal Society, March 27th, says the tendency of modern rivers is to produce gorges not wide valleys, and existing ones could not, he says, make such as the higher-level gravels exhibit.
The heads in Cornwall are, as far as proved, British in character, without proof of contemporaneity in animal remains.
Note further, M. Elie de Beaumont, in the discussions in the Academy of Sciences, admitting the truth of M. Quatrefage's statement that the man's jaw was found really in the quarries of Moulin Quignon in its own bed, declared that the bed was not older than the turf deposits. It was what he called pente meuble (shifting incline) and that he adhered to the opinion of Cuvier, that man and the Elephas primigenius were not contemporaries.
