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 THE LIBRARY 
 
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 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
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 OPENING of tl^e LEWIS BROOKS MUSEUM 
 
 AT THE 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, 
 
 JUNE 27th, 187 8. 
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 ON 
 
 MAN'S Age in the V/orld. 
 
 BY 
 
 JAS. C SOUTHALL, A, M., LL. D., 
 
 WITH INTRODUCTORY REHJARKS OF 
 
 Hon. A. H. H. STUART, Rector 
 
 lluljmouCi: 
 Printed by order of the Board of Visitors. 
 
 1878.
 
 CLEMMITT & JONES, 
 
 PRINTERS, 
 
 RICHMOND, VA.
 
 Si 3. 
 
 ou 
 
 RESOLUTIONS OF THE BOARD OF VISITORS, 
 
 PASSED JUNE 27, 1878. 
 
 Whereas this board desires to preserve in a permanent shape some record 
 of the public opening of the Brooks"Museum, both in grateful appreciation of 
 the munificence of Mr. Brooks, and to give enduring form to the addresses 
 delivered on the occasion : Therefore, 
 
 Resolved, i. That we hereby request of Hon. A. H. H. Stuart and Dr. 
 J. C. Southall copies of the addresses delivered by them this day. 
 
 Resolved, 2. That the Executive Committee cause to be printed one thou- 
 sand copies of said addresses, with such other matter as they may judge 
 suitable, of which two hundred copies shall be bound. 
 
 Resolved, 3. That ten copies of said publication so bound shall be deposited 
 in the University Library, and the others disposed of as the Executive Commit- 
 tee may deem best. 
 
 Resolved, 4. That the Executive Committee be authorized to draw on the 
 Proctor for cost of publication. 
 
 Resolved, 5. That Mr. Hart be requested to ask of Dr. Southall a copy of his 
 address. 
 
 550371
 
 
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 y^^k-^ 
 
 ^
 
 Prefatory Note. 
 
 Early in 1S76, Professor Henry A. Ward, of Rochester, 
 New York, in correspondence with Professor Smith, of the Uni- 
 versity of Virginia, announced to him that a gentleman of 
 Rochester, an admirer of Mr. Jefferson, and an earnest well- 
 wisher of the South, who directed that his name should be with- 
 held, desired to promote the study of Natural History in the 
 University by the establishment of a complete and costly Mu- 
 seum on the condition that other friends of the institution would 
 raise the sum of $12,000 to provide for the necessary cases, 
 mounting, transportation, &c. 
 
 The Board of Trustees of the Miller Agricultural Department 
 of the University promptly pledged $10,000 of the required 
 amount, and Professor W. B. Rogers and other alumni furnished 
 the remaining $2,000 of the required sum. This having been 
 secured, the following letter was addressed to the Hon. A. H. H. 
 Stuart, Rector of the University, by the still unknown benefactor, 
 under the bonds of secrecy : 
 
 Rochester, April 14th, 1876. 
 
 To the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia : 
 
 Gentlemen : — Prof. Henry N. Ward, of this city, will deliver to you 
 herewith forty-five of the bonds of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Rail- 
 road Company, of one thousand dollars each — $45,000. 
 
 This sum being deemed by Prof. Ward sufficient to enable you to provide a 
 suitable Building for a Cabinet of Natural Science (with the exception of 
 Botany) and to procure through him, on terms which will be mutually satis- 
 factory, the necessary material for such Cabinet, which in extent and in all
 
 6 Opening of the Lczuis Brooks Miise7im. 
 
 respects will be well adapted to the purpose of instruction in this department of 
 education in the University of Virginia, I respectfully tender for your accept- 
 ance the Bonds above-mentioned; the avails of twenty-five of them to be 
 devoted to the procurement of the material for said Cabinet, the remaining 
 twenty to the erection of a suitable building. 
 
 I am, gentlemen, 
 
 Very respectfully yours, 
 
 Lewis Brooks. 
 
 The proceeds of the bonds mentioned in this letter amounted 
 to $50,000. To this sum Mr. Brooks subsequently added nearly 
 $20,000 for the extension of the building and of the collection, 
 authorizing among other things the addition of a Botanical Hall. 
 The building was completed in July, 1877, and before the splen- 
 did collection of specimens which now fills its wide halls and 
 well-planned galleries had been fully arranged and placed in 
 position, the telegraph announced the name and sudden death, 
 on the evening of the 9th of August, 1877, of Virginia's wise 
 and noble benefactor. His heirs, in order to carry out fully his 
 plan for the Museum, have generously offered to complete the 
 collection by adding the specimens for the Botanical Hall. The 
 Museum has attracted much attention, and stands on the site se- 
 lected by its founder — a splendid addition to the educational 
 forces of the University of Virginia, and a lasting monument to 
 the memory of Lewis Brooks.
 
 Address of Hon. A. H. H. Stuart. 
 
 Ladies and Gentlemen: 
 
 The occasion which has brought us 
 together to-day must be recognized by all who are present, as 
 one of extraordinary interest, and, I doubt not, it will be so re- 
 garded by generations which are to come after us. We have 
 met to commemorate, by suitable ceremonials, the formal open- 
 ing and dedication of the "Lewis Brooks Museum of Natu- 
 ral Science;" and to render honor to the memory of its mu- 
 nificent founder. 
 
 Aside from the mere fact of the noble contribution to the cause 
 of science which has been made by him, there are considera- 
 tions, connected with the time and circumstances uncler which his 
 benefaction was bestowed, which demand that they should not 
 only be gratefully acknowledged by us, but that they should be 
 transmitted, in a form more enduring than granite or marble, to 
 future generations. 
 
 Shortly after the close of the recent civil war, which was so 
 wxll calculated to awaken and call into action the worst passions 
 of our nature; and when, in fact, the two great sections of our 
 country were inflamed and exasperated against each other by all 
 the angry feelings and prejudices engendered by the then recent 
 fierce sectional conflict, the extraordinary spectacle was pre- 
 sented to the public, of an old gentleman, of one of the northern 
 states, — venerable alike for his age and private virtues — a man, 
 theretofore unheralded by fame, — and whose name even was un-
 
 8 Opening of the Leivis Brooks Miiseiitn. 
 
 known to the people of Virginia — rising above the infirmities of 
 human nature, and animated by that spirit of Christian charity 
 "which is not easily provoked, and thinketh no evil," becoming 
 the generous founder, at the oldest university of the Southern 
 States, of the splendid Museum, which we are now about to dedi- 
 cate to its appropriate uses. 
 
 His singular modesty and disinterestedness in this act of 
 beneficence is evinced by the fact that he refused constantly, as 
 lono- as he lived, to allow his name to be made known even to 
 the Visitors and Faculty of the University on which he had con- 
 ferred so great a favor, and until his death, a few months ago, the 
 Rector of the University was the sole depositary of his secret. 
 
 There is much in this magnanimous act, and in the circum- 
 stances under which it was done, which tend to stamp it with the 
 impress of moral sublimity. 
 
 It has been the custom of men in all ages to commemorate 
 lofty deeds of their fellow-men by suitable monuments, intended 
 to transmit them to the remotest posterity. This seems to us 
 to be one of the deeds which deserves to be thus perpetuated. 
 
 Fortunately, there is no need that we should erect any monu- 
 ment of bronze or marble, to hand down to future ages, the name 
 of "Lewis Brooks." The Museum itself stands, and, I hope, 
 will forever stand, — a noble matcidal moJiiunent of his munificent 
 contribution to the cause of science. 
 
 But there are other memorials which are more durable than 
 brass or monumental marble. 
 
 The ruins of Babylon, of Baalbec, and of Palmyra, teach us 
 that the proudest structures erected by human hands, must soon 
 crumble beneath the touch of time's effacing finger; while the 
 creations of the human intellect, like the works of Homer, Thu- 
 cidydes, and Aristode, are destined to continue indestructible, 
 through all future ages.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 
 
 It was, therefore, wisely determined by the authorities of the 
 University to perpetuate the memory of our munificent benefac- 
 tor, by inscribing his name, in letters of living light, on the 
 archives of the institution, and by associating it inseparably with 
 a noble intellectual contribution to the store of human knowledge. 
 
 In casting about for an architect competent to plan and erect 
 this intellectual vioniinient, more stately than the proudest col- 
 umn, and more durable than the pyramids of Egypt, it was 
 readily perceived that he should be a native of Virginia, inti- 
 mately acquainted with Virginian character, and deeply imbued 
 with Virginian feeling, so that he might give suitable expression to 
 the sentiment of Virginia. It was proper, in the next place, that 
 he should be an alumnus of the University, with a heart filled 
 with filial love to his alma viatcr, and a mind trained to letters, 
 and scientific investigation, by her admirable system of intellec- 
 tual culture. Finally, it was necessary that he should be a man 
 of vigorous intellect, of catholic sentiment, of ripe scholarship, 
 and known to the world as being in full sympathy with the cause 
 of science and human progress. 
 
 I grant that it was a difficult task to find a man in whom all 
 these high qualifications were harmoniously blended. But all 
 will admit that the authorities of the University have been fortu- 
 nate in securing the services of a gentleman eminently qualified 
 for this high and responsible duty, when I introduce to you, as 
 the orator of the day, Mr. James Cocke Southall, of Virginia.
 
 Man's Age in the World: 
 
 An Address delivered at the request of the Faculty of the Uni- 
 versity OF Virginia, on the occasion of the opening of the 
 Lewis Brooks Museum of Natural Science, June 27TH, 
 1878, BY James C. Southall, A. M., LL. D. 
 
 Jlfr. Rector and Gentlemen of the Board of Visitors : 
 Mr. Chairma?i and Gentlemen of the Faculty : 
 Ladies and Gentlemen :' 
 
 We have assembled here, and I have been requested to 
 deliver this address, in connection with the formal opening of the 
 Lewis Brooks Museum of Natural Science. By the munificence 
 of a stranger who lived and died in a distant State, aided from 
 the endowment bestowed by a large-hearted Virginian, we ha\'e 
 placed another jewel in the diadem of our Alma Mater, and I am 
 bold to say have marked a new era in the history of the Univer- 
 sity. Breaking through the ties of sectional prejudice and pro- 
 vincial sentiment, and recognizing in this institution the presence 
 of that immortal spirit who was the broadest and most far-seeing 
 of all the American statesmen, our benefactor has erected here 
 one of those imperishable monuments, which, in comparison with 
 the cold and pulseless marble, is like some beautiful fountain, 
 sleeping and breathing in the silent rock, and sending forth 
 forever its pure and unsullied crystal waters. Oftentimes, men 
 of generous and liberal ideas, misplace the subjects of their 
 bounty; the gift is often unsuitable or incapable of utilization.
 
 12 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Musenin. 
 
 and large sums of money are wasted and thrown away, because 
 misdirected towards the general object in view. By a happy 
 inspiration Mr. Brooks, if I may borrow a phrase from the distin- 
 guished professor of Moral Philosophy, seems to have "in- 
 tuited" the need of our University; it was precisely such a 
 museum as this that we wanted right here, to draw the attention 
 of our young men to the most engrossing study that now engages 
 the devotees of science, and to equip our noble institution in 
 some sort for that field of investigation which has grown of late 
 into such importance. 
 
 We could very well dispense with a gallery of pictures, or a 
 School of Design, although I do hope that Drawing will here- 
 after receive that attention in our male and female schools which 
 it so richly deserves ; nor are we prepared for a chair of Sanskrit 
 or Oriental Literature; nor for Egyptology or the Chinese Lan- 
 guage and Literature; nor have we any imperative need for a 
 Museum of Archaeology; we can even wait, if our noble friend 
 will favor us, for our great telescope, which we hope to see 
 crowning at no distant day one of the neighboring eminences ; 
 but that the young men of Virginia and the South should enter 
 upon the study of Geology and Zoology, in the present state of 
 science, hardly admits of further delay, and in receiving the 
 specimens which have been collected and arranged in yonder 
 Museum, headed by that portentous effigy* which is the most 
 conspicuous object in the several halls, I am sure you will agree 
 with me, Mr. Rector and gentlemen, that we have no elephant on 
 our hands ! 
 
 That elephant is one of the most interesting objects now in the 
 domain of science. If we can fix the Mammoth's "place in 
 nature" — to use the words of the gifted Huxley — we can fix that 
 of man ; and I am glad that the young gentlemen here, in the 
 
 *The Mammoth.
 
 Man's Age in ihc World. 13 
 
 presence of this Colossus, have ever before them a mute, yet 
 persuasive, invocation into the path of Anthropological study. 
 
 The invitation to deliver this address was accompanied by the 
 request that I should select for the occasion a topic which I have 
 made a special subject of investigation for some years, and I shall 
 therefore, as far as it can be done in a brief hour's time, attempt 
 to lay before you the present phase of the question of " Man's 
 Age in the World." 
 
 It is alleged, as you are aware, gentlemen, — monstrous as it 
 appears to the unscientific and those who have not paused to 
 reflect on the subject — that, surrounded as we are in that Mu- 
 seum by all those Rhizopods, Euripterids, Selachians, Saurian 
 and Simian forms, we stand there in the presence of our ances- 
 tors : — a grotesque and ill-favoured procession of progenitors ! 
 It seems to me, therefore, eminently appropriate, in these inaugu- 
 ration ceremonies, that we should undertake to fix with some 
 little exactness the precise relations which are to exist between 
 the old residents here and the new intruders in these classic 
 shades. I think it will be well to disabuse our minds of any 
 suspicion of relationship — say between the Professor of History 
 and the Rhamphorhynciis Bncklandi — or the Mathematical Pro- 
 fessor and the Inoceranius rectangiihis, that pioneer geometer of 
 the Jurassic seas — if in fact no such link exists; and on the 
 other hand, if that Cynocephahis haniadryas or that Macac2is 
 silcnus is your great-great-great (to the n"' power) grandfather — 
 or to speak more accurately, a very distant cousin, descended 
 from the same stirps — I think a knowledge of that fact would 
 lead you to look with deeper interest, when you enter that room, 
 on his portrait. 
 
 Evolution is now the doctrine of a large majority of the scien- 
 tific men of Europe and America. It has proceeded so far that 
 you will find it (as also the doctrine of the Antiquity of Man)
 
 14 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Miiseiun. 
 
 incorporated in our advanced text-books of Geology, like Lyell's 
 and Page's and LeConte's. Whatever opinion one may hold on 
 the subject, I cannot but regard this introduction of it into a text- 
 book as a grave infraction of the governing principle of all true 
 science, and a most dangerous departure from that rigid scientific 
 method which is the true glory of science. Science is positive 
 knowledge ; the true scientific spirit is characterized by a caution 
 that almost exceeds that of a conveyancer. No proposition is 
 admitted into the scheme which has not passed the most rigid 
 scrutiny, and been found to be — so far as anything human is 
 sure — absolutely certain and unassailable. On the portals of its 
 Temple is written, " No hypothesis enters here." 
 
 While, therefore, it is perfectly legitimate to frame conjectures 
 as to the origin of life, or the appearance of new forms of life, it 
 is an unwarrantable abandonment of the fundamental law of 
 science to propound any statement on this subject as an ascer- 
 tained fact which the propounder does not know to be true. 
 We do not quarrel with Pythagoras for his doctrine of the har- 
 mony of the spheres, for he lived in an uncritical age, and did 
 not claim to found his philosophy on observation; nor do we 
 quarrel with the elemental substances of Empedocles, or with the 
 atoms of Leucippus and Gassendi; or with the ideas and the 
 mathematical forms of Plato ; or with the monads of Bruno and 
 Leibnitz ; and we smile at Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, 
 and Semmes's vagaries about the North Pole; because these were 
 avowedly guesses at truth, and Physical Science in the true 
 sense (as regards most of the instances cited) did not then exist. 
 But if any physicist in these days should gravely teach that the 
 elementary substance of all things is ascertained to consist of 
 spherical monads or metaphysical points; or that water proceeds 
 from elements having the icosahedral form, fire from elements of 
 the pyramidal form, earth from elements of the cubical form, and
 
 Man's Age in the World. " 15 
 
 that the form of the universe is related to the dodecahedron ; or 
 that fire and the soul consist of fine, smooth, round atoms, and 
 that the worlds have been generated by the rotatory motion in 
 space of myriads of fortuitous atoms of different weights ; would 
 any one in such a case challenge our right to call a halt in the 
 name of Science, and ask for what I believe in legal phrase is 
 styled a bill of particulars ? 
 
 Now while it is by no means the absurd theory which it is 
 popularly thought to be; while it is largely supported by the 
 analogies of nature; no conscientious advocate of Evolution will 
 say that it is more than a belief : not one solitary case has been 
 made out. There is not an animal living, or an animal form in 
 the geological strata, whose pedigree has ever been positively 
 carried across the barrier of species. 
 
 I have not the slightest idea, however, of discussing on this 
 occasion the doctrine of Evolution ; it would extend my remarks 
 far too much to go into that subject. As bearing, nevertheless, 
 on my main theme, the Appearance of Man on the Earth, I am 
 compelled to touch the subject in a very general way. If Man 
 was developed from the lower animals, his age, of course, is 
 inconceivable. In that case we should have to trace man back 
 through a long line of ancestors until, somewhere in the Tertiary 
 strata, we reached the common trunk from which the anthropoid 
 and pithecoid types bifurcated. No such forms have, however, 
 been found, earlier than the close of the Quaternary, and the 
 human skeletons of this date — the oldest human skeletons — are 
 precisely like the human skeletons of to-day, with the same 
 general frame and the same cerebral capacity. Nor have any 
 human implements been found in the Tertiary strata. Certain 
 incised bones were found some ten years ago in the Pliocene 
 strata of France, at St. Prest, and similarly marked bones were 
 found about the same time in the Val d' Arno, in Italy, by Prof.
 
 16 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museiim. 
 
 Ramorino ; and it was claimed that they had been cut by human 
 hands. The distinguished Professor Lesley of Pennsylvania was 
 misled by the discovery, and prematurely announced in a public 
 lecture in Boston that Tertiary man had at last been found. 
 Lyell, however, afterwards ascertained that precisely similar 
 striae and cuttings are made by the porcupine, and as the re- 
 mains of the Trogo7itherium. a great extinct rodent, were found 
 at St. Prest, in the same beds with the incised bones, it was natu- 
 rally concluded that this animal, and not man, had left the marks 
 which seemed so full of interest to Prof Lesley. The Abbe 
 Bourgeois in France also claims to have found worked flints in 
 a Miocene bed at Thenay, but his conclusions are not accepted 
 by any careful geologist, and in fact would prove too much, as on 
 the Evolution theory man could not by this time have developed 
 sufficiently to manufacture stone implements. 
 
 Prof O. C. Marsh of Yale, and Prof Whitney of California, 
 have also been misled, and have spoken unadvisedly with regard 
 to the discovery of traces of man in the Pliocene of California ; 
 and Prof Le Conte, in his recent elaborate and valuable " Ele- 
 ments of Geology," has given some countenance to this mistake.* 
 
 In this case too the evidence proves too much, as the human 
 implements found, at the depth of 200 feet, under the lava de- 
 posits of California, in the auriferous gravel, consist of superb 
 granite mortars and dishes, of large size, and beautiful weapons 
 and tools belonging to the Polished Stone Age (if not, rather, 
 that of the metals); and it must only excite a smile to suppose 
 that man was a skilled artisan in granite in the Tertiary Age. 
 The objects found in the gold-bearing beds of California were 
 doubtless left there, as I have shown elsewhere, by the ancient 
 
 *Prof. Marsh's Address before the American Association in 1S77; Foster's 
 Prehist. Races of United States, p. 53 ; Le Conte's Elements of Geology, p. 
 
 567-
 
 Mail's Age in the World. ' IT 
 
 inhabitants of this region, who sank deep shafts and ran long 
 galleries in the mountains in their search for gold. 
 
 Mr. Bancroft, in his " Native Races of the Pacific States," has 
 collected a number of instances in which these mortars have been 
 met with, and "they have been found," he tells us, "in almost 
 every instance by miners in their search for gold;" and they 
 come in almost every instance from the "auriferous gravel."* 
 
 The abundance of the precious metals we know excited the 
 astonishment and the cupidity of the Spaniards in both Mexico 
 and Peru, and both gold and copper, we are told by Mr. Ban- 
 croft, were mined in ancient times in Mexico from veins in the 
 solid rock, extensive galleries being opened for the purpose.! 
 They carried their excavations, we are informed, 200 feet or more 
 to procure the chalchiuite ;{: so much worn by them, and so highly 
 prized as an ornament. 
 
 So the Mound-Builders, a much ruder race, mined for copper 
 on the shores of Lake Superior, and for mica in the mountains 
 of North Carolina. 
 
 Schoolcraft mentions the actual discovery of one of these 
 ancient shafts in California, at a place called " Murphy's," one of 
 the very places where these stone mortars have been found. At 
 the bottom of this shaft, 210 feet in depth, a human skeleton was 
 found, and "an altar of worship.";^ 
 
 We have here, therefore, ah obvious explanation of these fre- 
 quent discoveries of stone mortars in the gold-bearing gravel 
 by the miners in California. They belong to the time of the 
 Aztecs and Toltecs, and were probably used for the purpose 
 of crushing the cemented gravel in which the gold is found.^i 
 
 *Vol. IV, p. 698, et seq. f Ibid. II, 474. 
 
 + Ibid. IV, 673. 
 
 § Schoolcraft's Archaeology, I, 105. 
 
 TfCuts of these mortars may be found in "The Native Races of the Pacific 
 States," or in " The Epoch of the Mammoth," pp. 395, 396. 
 2
 
 18 Opening of the Leivis Bi'ooks Museum. 
 
 A few years since it was asserted that a human fibula had been 
 found under the glacial clay in the Victoria Cave, in Yorkshire, 
 England, and Prof. Boyd Dawkins — perhaps the most learned of 
 all the European archaeologists — claimed that it established the 
 fact that man in the North of Europe ^n^s, pre -glacial. Remains 
 of the domesticated animals have, however, since been found in 
 the same bed, great doubt has been thrown over the glacial date 
 of the clay, and the bone is now pronounced to belong probably 
 to a bear. Although he had announced the discovery of pre- 
 glacial man in 1874, Prof. Dawkins, at a meeting of the Geo- 
 logical Society of London held last year, formally retracted this 
 declaration, and at a Conference of Anthropologists held in Lon- 
 don at the Anthropological Institute, about the same time, it was 
 generally conceded that there is no evidence of pre-glacial man 
 in England.* 
 
 Prof. Riitimeyer's sharpened sticks found in the inter-glacial 
 bed at Diirnten, in Switzerland, are also given up in the last 
 number of the Edinburgh Reznew ;\ and the first traces of man 
 are thus brought down, by pretty general consent, to the close of 
 the Quaternary period — the post-glacial epoch, when the rude 
 flint implements referred to man appear in the river gravel and 
 in the older bone caves. Here, gentlemen, we may pause. 
 
 Man appears — and appears fully developed — at the close of the 
 Quaternary Period. The tertiary strata and the overlying quater- 
 nary beds have been carefully searched now for a series of years 
 in Europe, America, and portions of Asia and Africa, and not a 
 solitary bone has been found which belonged to any intermediate 
 form between man and the ape. I will quote on this point the 
 declarations of the eminent Prof Virchow of Berlin, at the Con- 
 
 *See Proceedings of Geolog. Soc. of London, April 11, 1877, and a Report 
 in Nature, ^o\. xvi. No. 397, p. 106, of a discussion at Anthropolog. Institute. 
 
 f April, 1878, article on "Bronze Age."
 
 Mail's Age in the World. 19 
 
 ference of German Naturalists and Physicians held at Munich in 
 September last : 
 
 There are at this time few students of nature who are not of opinion that 
 man stands in some connection with the rest of the animal kingdom, and that 
 such a connection may possibly be discovered, if not with the apes, yet, perhaps, 
 as Herr Vogt now supposes, at some other point. I freely acknowledge that this 
 is a desideratum in Science. I am quite prepared for such a result, and I should 
 neither be surprised nor astonished if the proof were produced that man had 
 ancestors among other vertebrate animals. You are aware that I am now spe- 
 cially engaged in the study of anthropology, but I am bound to declare that 
 every positive advance which we have made in the province of prehistoric an- 
 thropology has actually removed us further from the proof of such a connection. 
 
 He goes on to speak of Quaternary man, and then proceeds as 
 follows : 
 
 When we study this fossil man of the quaternary period, who must of course 
 have stood comparatively near our primitive ancestors in the series of descent, 
 or rather of ascent, we always find a man just such as men are now. As re- 
 cently as ten years ago, whenever a skull was found in a peat bog, or in pile- 
 dwellings, or in ancient caves, people fancied they saw in it a wonderful token 
 of a savage state still quite undeveloped. They smelt out the very scent of the 
 ape — only the trail has gradually been lost more and more. The old troglo- 
 dytes, pile-villagers and bog people prove to be quite a respectable society. 
 They have heads so large that many a living person would be only too happy to 
 possess such. Our French neighbors, indeed, have warned us against inferring 
 too much from these big heads. It may have been that their contents were not 
 merely nerve substance, but that the ancient brains may have had more con- 
 nective tissues than is now usual, and that, in spite of the size of the brain, their 
 nerve substance may have remained at a lower stage of development. This, 
 however, is but a sort of familiar talk which is employed in some measure as a 
 support of weak minds. On the whole we must really acknowledge that there 
 is a complete absence of any fossil type of a lower stage in the development of 
 man. Nay, if we gather together the whole sum of the fossil men hitherto 
 known and put them parallel with those of the present time, we can decidedly 
 pronounce that there are among living men a much gi eater number of individ- 
 uals who show a relatively inferior type than there are among the fossils known
 
 20 Opening of the Lezvis Brooks Musetmi. 
 
 up to this time. Whether it is just the highest geniuses of the quaternary 
 period that have had the good luck to be preserved to us, I will not venture to 
 surmise. Our usual course is to argue from the character of a single fossil ob- 
 ject to the generality of those not yet found. This, however, I will not do. I 
 will not affirm that the whole race was as good as the few skulls that have sur- 
 vived. But one thing I must say — that not a single fossil skull of an ape or of 
 an anthropoid ape has yet been found that could really have belonged to a human 
 being. Every addition to the amount of objects which we have obtained as 
 materials to discuss have removed us further from this hypothesis. 
 
 As I have already remarked, I have no idea this morning of 
 discussing the question of Evolution. But I just want to call 
 your attention to this great fact of this immeasurable gap be- 
 tween man and the most advanced of all the brute forms. 
 Whatever be true back of all this — however cogent may be the 
 argument for the evolution of the Simian types from the lowest 
 animal forms through the ages of geology, the evidence stops 
 with the brute creation, and the theory as applied to the evolu- 
 tion of man, as the matter now stands, is entirely unsupported 
 by any facts. The only hope held out of finding the missing 
 links (of which, in order to be successful, it would be necessary 
 to find not one, but a great many) is that suggested by Sir 
 Charles Lyell* and Dr. Peschel, that as the habitat of the anthro- 
 pomorphous apes is in tropical countries, the missing apes may 
 hereafter be found in Western Africa or the islands of Borneo and 
 Sumatra, which, it is remarked, have not yet been explored; or 
 in a lost district of the earth (supposed to be lost) in the Indian 
 Ocean, between Africa and India, which Peschel names Lemuria. 
 Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace has, however, very pertinently ob- 
 served on this, that in Miocene times an almost tropical climate 
 prevailed in the South of Europe, and that we must suppose 
 even the earliest ancestors of man to have been terrestrial and 
 
 * Antiq. of Man, last Eng. edit. p. 53S. See Races of Man by Peschel, a 
 most valuable work.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 21 
 
 omniverous (and so, widely dispersed) ; and, therefore, the Euro- 
 pean strata would be as likely to furnish the missing links as 
 equatorial Africa.* 
 
 This gulf between man and the gorilla has not been bridged 
 over; and there are others in the geological record that are 
 equally wide and abrupt. 
 
 As there is a great gap between the beasts of the field and 
 man, so there is an unbridged gulf (unless the few diminutive 
 marsupials of the Triassic and Jurassic periods should be re- 
 garded as furnishing one of the missing links) between the Rep- 
 tilian forms and the Birds of the Secondary Age and the Mam- 
 mals of the Tertiary. Carnivorous and herbivorous mammals, 
 in great numbers, and of many species, — and strangest of all, the 
 monkeys — appear upon the scene at the base of the Tertiary 
 with the most startling abruptness — unheralded and with no evo- 
 lutionary trumpet to sound their approach.f The uppermost 
 Cretaceous beds, which is the closing member of the Secondary, 
 have been generally supposed to represent a period of great dis- 
 turbance in the geological history, which ^vas concluded from 
 the fact that in Europe and elsewhere the Eocene beds of the 
 Tertiary were found to lie unconformably, on the tilted or crum- 
 pled Cretaceous beds. It was conjectured that these traces of 
 disturbance indicated a lost period between the Cretaceous and 
 the Eocene, and that if these lost leaves could be recovered the 
 gap in the succession of life would be bridged over by the detec- 
 tion of the intermediate forms. But Prof Hayden, who, as you 
 
 *Address before British Association in 1S76. 
 
 f In the oldest Eocene beds (Wahsatch beds of the Green river and San Juan 
 basins) Cope finds eighty-seven species of vertebrates, two-thirds of which are 
 mammals. In the Fort Bridger beds of the Green River basin (Middle Eocene) 
 Marsh finds 150 species of vertebrates, of which the larger number are mam-, 
 mals, some Herbivora, some Carnivora, some Lemurine monkeys. Le Conte's 
 <Jeol., p. 495.
 
 22 Opening of the Leivis Brooks Miisetmi. 
 
 know, has been actively engaged for some years in the explora- 
 tion of our Western Territories, finds that in some places, espe- 
 cially on the Plains, a continuous series of conformable rocks 
 connects the two eras. "The record," says Le Conte, "seems to 
 be continuous." And yet here there is the same sudden and 
 extraordinary change in the life-system which we observe in the 
 unconformable strata of Europe. "The abruptness of the trans- 
 ition," says Dana, "is astounding."* Now in some regions the 
 Cretaceous beds were formed in deep-water, and we could not 
 expect ordinarily to find remains of terrestrial fossils in them ; 
 but this is not true of the Rocky Mountain or Atlantic border 
 deposits of North America, nor of those of many localities on 
 other continents. Le Conte observes that it is impossible to 
 explain these facts on the theory of evolution " unless we admit 
 periods of rapid evohitio7i" f or, as he elsewhere expresses it, 
 "paroxysms of evolution." 
 
 As there is a break between the Tertiary and the later Qua- 
 ternary (the Reign of Ice intervening), and a break between the 
 Secondary and the tertiary, so in passing from the Lower to the 
 Upper Silurian and Devonian, the seas suddenly swarm with gi- 
 gantic and highly-organized fishes. In a moment — in the twink- 
 ling of an eye — with no suspicion of a break in the record — we 
 pass at one leap from the Mollusks and Crustaceans of the Lower 
 Silurian to the Sharks and Gar- Fishes of the Upper Silurian and 
 Devonian. Some of these fishes were from twenty to thirty feet 
 in length, and belonged to a very advanced type of fishes, being 
 allied to the Reptilian forms. " It is impossible," says Le Conte, 
 "to overlook the comparative suddenness of the appearance of a 
 new class — fishes — and a new department — vertebrates — of the 
 animal kingdom." "Observe," he continues, "that at the horizon 
 
 * Manual of Geology, last edit., p. 602. 
 I Elements of Geol., p. 475.
 
 Mans Age in the World. ' 23 
 
 of appearance in the Upper Silurian, there is no apparent break 
 in the strata, and therefore no evidence of lost record; and yet 
 the advance is immense. It is impossible to account for this 
 unless we admit paroxysms of evolution, &c."* 
 
 But there is yet another startling apparition in the succession 
 of palaeontological forms : if we go back to the Lower Silurian 
 resting on the Archaean or Eozoic rocks, we find the highly- 
 organized Trilobites and Cephalopods — heading, as it were, the 
 long succession of animal life. In the Archaean rocks we find 
 only the lowest Protozoan life — the questionable, systemless 
 Eozoon Canadense ;'\ and with the very dawn of the next era 
 we find "all the great types of structure except the vertebrate." 
 "And these," adds Le Conte, who believes in Evolution, "not 
 the lowest of their type, as might have been expected, but already 
 trilobites among the Articulata and cephalopods among Mollusca 
 — animals luhich can hardly be regarded as lower than viidway in 
 the animal scaled % 
 
 As the facts now stand, it seems to me impossible to reconcile 
 them with Evolution as taught by the disciples of Mr. Darwin in 
 Europe. To evade the difficulty our American Evolutionists (in 
 which they were preceded by Mr. St. George Mivart) have in- 
 vented the theory of Paj'oxysmal Evolution — Evolution by leaps. 
 There was a leap from the plant-like Protozoan to the huge Crus- 
 taceans with their great many-lensed eyes, and to those monster 
 straight-shelled nautili or cuttle-fishes (some of them fifteen feet 
 long) which were the scavengers of the Silurian seas. There was 
 a sudden leap from these Crustaceans and Mollusks, with no inter- 
 
 * Elements of Geol. p. ^,1^. 
 
 f There is some reason to believe that fossils occur in the Huronian beds — 
 the upper stratum of the Archaean ; but the point is not yet settled. This Hu- 
 ronian, it is thought, may prove to be altered Silurian. Certain alleged discov- 
 . eries have been made in New England; but the subject has not as yet been 
 thoroughly studied. 
 
 J Elements of Geol. p. 288.
 
 24 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 vening forms, to the monster sharks and gar-fishes of the Devo- 
 nian. There was a sudden leap from the Fish to the Amphibian. 
 There was a sudden leap from the great Saurians of the Second- 
 ary Age to the abounding mammalian life of the Tertiary strata; 
 and finally, by a similar evolutionary paroxysm, some ape-like 
 organism, about the close of the Glacial Epoch — quick as the 
 re-adjusted crystals of the kaleidoscope — assumed abruptly the 
 human form.* 
 
 * These abrupt and tremendous changes in the succession of geological life 
 are fatal to the theory of gradual evolution. In the first place, there is in some 
 of the instances no indication of any missing pages from the record; the text 
 seems to be unmutilated and continuous. This is notably the case in the trans- 
 ition from the crustaceans and mollusks to the fishes. 
 
 But, in the second place, if intermediate forms between the trilobite and the 
 fish, or the ape and man, once existed, what has become of them? The missing 
 links, if such there were, must have been considerable in number, and the indi- 
 viduals representing each link in the chain must have existed by tens of thou- 
 sands and millions. The transitional forms must have been a hundred times 
 more numerous than the completed type, and yet we find perfect trilobites and 
 perfect fishes, perfect apes and perfect men, and no trilobites in transitu to fishes, 
 and no apes in transitu to men — although we ought to meet them at a hundred 
 points. Where are the intermediate forms between birds and mammals? We 
 ought to find hundreds of these intermediate forms, with imperfectly developed 
 organs; if they existed, there is no reason why we should always miss just these 
 transitional forms, and no others. If we had missed them in one country, we 
 ought to find them in another. The same gaps essentially are reproduced in 
 Europe, Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Australia. The 
 alleged pedigree of the horse, and such forms as the archceopteryx, and the many 
 similar discoveries which will be made, do not seriously touch this difficulty. 
 The great chasms to which I have referred still remain, and will not be appre- 
 ciably diminished by these discoveries. If it should be asserted that the silver 
 dollar had been gradually developed by some natural process out of the copper 
 cent, and we should be able to discover only one-cent pieces, two-cent pieces, 
 three-cent pieces, five-cent pieces, ten-cent pieces, quarters, half-dollars, and dol- 
 lars ; and if, moreever, exactly the same pieces, and no others, were found in 
 all parts of the world, the theory would have to be abandoned; because it 
 would be incredible, if the four-cent pieces, the six-cent pieces, the seven-cent 
 pieces, the eight cent pieces— the thirty-cent pieces, the forty-cent pieces, the 
 seventy-cent pieces, &c. — once existed as transitional links, that we should al- 
 ways miss just these particular pieces, and always find just the others in all 
 parts of the world. Unless we could assign some good reason for the disap-
 
 Man's Age in the World. ' 25 
 
 This is the present position of the question. A common 
 ground has been reached on which Evolutionists and non-Evolu- 
 tionists can stand — the sudden apparition of new and widely- 
 diver<^ent types. As to the origin of these new forms Science 
 knows nothing. The field for conjecture is open. Those who 
 believe in specific acts of creation,* on the ground of a Divine 
 Revelation on the subject, may hold their opinion ; those who do 
 not believe in the revelation may refer the apparition of the 
 Trilobite, the Shark, the Saurian, the Tapir, and Man, to a cer- 
 tain " internal force or tendency," or to a sudden change in the 
 climate, the physical geography, the atmosphere, or some abnor- 
 mal natural cause, deemed by them sufficient to produce the 
 results. 
 
 Our present business is with Man : that he appeared suddenly, 
 as the evidence stands, is generally conceded. It has been men- 
 tioned also that, according to Prof Virchow, the first human 
 skulls which we encounter are remarkable for their large cerebral 
 cavity. To the same purport Dr. Pruner-Bey, speaking of the 
 skulls which were obtained from the palaeolithic station of Solu- 
 tre, in Eastern France, remarks, that we find here " no approach 
 to the Simians — Man was constituted man in the full force of the 
 term." Dr. Broca bears the same testimony as to the skulls from 
 the Cro-Magnon cave at Les Eyzies, as does Prof Owen with 
 regard to the skulls obtained from the rock-shelter of Bruniquel. 
 The celebrated Engis skull, which was found in Belgium under a 
 floor of stalagmite, associated with bones of the rhinoceros, mam- 
 
 pearance of all the missing pieces, we should be compelled to conclude that 
 they never existed. In that case, if we still held to the doctrine of evolution, 
 we should have to adopt the paroxysmal evolution of Mivart and Clarence 
 King, and assert that the quarter was developed out of the ten-cent piece by a 
 paroxysmal act, and the dollar out of the half-dollar by a yet more violent pro- 
 cess. This of course is merely an illustration. 
 
 * Which, in some of the stages, need not exclude a basis of pre-existing animal 
 or vegetable life.
 
 26 Opening of the Lczvis Brooks Mjisewn. 
 
 moth, &€., is, says Prof. Huxley, "a fair average skull, which 
 might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained 
 the thoughtless brains of a savage." The Neanderthal skull, 
 about which so much has been written, has a capacity of 75 cubic 
 inches, greater than the average Malay, and double that of the 
 largest gorilla skull known. A good deal of misplaced discus- 
 sion was wasted on this skull by Prof Huxley, Lyell, Schaaffhau- 
 sen, and others, as there is no evidence whatever of its antiquity. 
 
 Let us advance a step farther: — we have seen that man appears 
 in Western Europe unheralded by any earlier anthropoid forms, 
 and "constituted man in the full force of the term:" how was it 
 in the East — for man originated there? The affinities of the 
 Cave-Dwellers of Europe with the modern Eskimo are admitted 
 by Prof Dawkins and other writers on the subject ;* they both 
 belong to the great Turanian family — the great Uralo-Altaic or 
 Turko-Finnic race — the ancient Asiatic Scythians — the great 
 Mongol race, which passed into North America — and which is 
 recognized again as one of the original elements of the primitive 
 inhabitants of Chalda'a or Babylonia. The climate of Europe at 
 this time was too cold for the Troglodytes to have originated 
 there : it is generally conceded that the original home of the race 
 was in Central Asia. The Egyptians, it is remarked by Brugsch 
 Bey, migrated from the centre of Asia. 
 
 Now the most astounding fact in all this matter is that in 
 Babylonia, on the Lower Euphrates, and in Egypt, where the 
 Egyptologists and Assyriologists have obtained, of late years, 
 such interesting results, man suddenly appears, and the very 
 first signal which he throws out are those vast Temple-Towers 
 of the Chaldaean Plain and those yet more wonderful Pyramids 
 which are perhaps the greatest structures ever erected by man. 
 This is the first glimpse which we catch of man in the East. 
 
 * Dawkins' Cave-Hunting, p. 358; Quarterly Review, Oct. 1876.
 
 Man's Age in the World. " 27 
 
 In the West we found him a fully developed man, but a savage: 
 in the East he intrudes upon the stage in the habiliments of 
 civilization. Strange as it seems, we meet him at the very out- 
 set in the character of a great Builder, and fashioning works of 
 statuary whose anatomical correctness is not surpassed by the 
 figures of Michael Angelo. There was a knowledge of the 
 cuneiform writing from the very first in Babylonia, and the 
 hieroglyphics of Egypt were used in the Fourth Dynasty, at 
 which time they had already assumed the cursive form. 
 
 A more modest picture is presented us in the first glimpse that 
 we catch of the primitive Aryans in their early seats on the Oxus 
 and Jaxartes ; they are not building any great cities, but they are 
 settled in villages with a kingly government, tilling the soil, con- 
 tracting marriages, fortifying their towns, harnessing horses and 
 oxen to carriages, with helmets and shields and swords of 
 bronze, and worshipping the holy Ahuramazda, "creator of 
 existing worlds, truth-telling," from whom proceeded "the 
 creative Word, which existed before all things, * * * having 
 its germ in truth." 
 
 Up to the present time Archaeology has sought in vain for 
 any earlier trace of man in these regions. In Egypt and Baby- 
 lonia they have succeeded in finding stone implements, but they 
 have been found there (in Babylonia very rude ones) in the 
 tombs, associated with objects of an advanced civilization. Or 
 they have been found on the surface of the ground in the valley 
 of the Nile, and were in use, according to M. Mariette, not only 
 in the Pharaonic but even in the Greek period.* There is no 
 eindence of a Stone Age of any sort in Egypt or Babylonia, and 
 no trace of the Palaeolithic or First Stone Age. 
 
 * Archiv fur Anthropologic, Januar, 1876, s. 250; Materiaux pour 1' Histoire 
 de r Homme, 1874, p. 17; Smith's Ancient Hist, of East, Eng. edit., vol. I,, 
 p. 210; Rawlinson's Five Great Monarchies, 2nd ed. I, pp. 95, 119, 120.
 
 "28 Opening of the Lciuis Brooks Museum. 
 
 But it is obvious that if man has been on the earth one hun- 
 dred, or two hundred, thousand years, he ought to have left his 
 rehcs in the valleys of the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris. No 
 palaeolithic implements associated with bones of extinct animals, 
 have been found in any of these countries. And it is impossible 
 that man could have reached the civilization of the Third Chal- 
 •daean and the Fourth Egyptian dynasties without leaving his 
 monuments and his implements strewed all along the way, if he 
 was actually living in these localities tens of thousands of years 
 before the date assigned to Menes. 
 
 This fact, that there is nothing in Egypt behind the Pyramids, 
 and nothing in Babylonia behind the bricks of Erech and Calneh, 
 cuts below the whole evidence for the antiquity of man in Cen- 
 tral and Western Europe ; but it is more satisfactory to give our 
 attention directly to the remains of human art found in Europe 
 under circumstances which have naturally occasioned a belief in 
 their great antiquity. Of course in this brief address the points 
 must rather be only rapidly touched, than elaborately discussed. 
 
 It is alleged that the prehistoric period is divided into three 
 ages — the Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of 
 Iron; and the Ag-e of Stone is further subdivided into the Palae- 
 olithic (or Old Stone) Age and the Neolithic (or Polished Stone) 
 Age. The Polished Stone Age is said to have been in progress 
 in Europe some six or seven thousand years ago ; the Palaeolithic 
 Age goes back one hundred, or two hundred, or five hundred, 
 thousand years. The relics of the Stone Age are found in the 
 ancient Stone-Graves, in the Lake-Dwellings, the Shell-Mounds, 
 the Peat, in Caves, and in the so-called drift of the River-Valleys. 
 
 A few years ago it was claimed that those mysterious Stone 
 Circles and other Rude Stone Monuments which occur in so 
 many parts of the world — in Europe, Asia, Northern Africa, 
 Peru — belonged to a very remote past, and Stonehenge was
 
 Man's Age in the World. ' 29' 
 
 affirmed in 1870 in the British Quarterly Reviezu, to be as old as 
 the foundations of Memphis, while Carnac and Locmariaker, in 
 Brittany, it was said, "have presented a yet more startling mes- 
 sage from the depths of their hoary antiquity." Stonehenge, 
 which is assigned to the Bronze Age, would, of course, be com- 
 paratively recent by the side of the chambered tumuli of Carnac, 
 which are assigned to the Stone Age; and if this so-called Dru- 
 idical circle, with its hewn stones, is as old as the Egyptian 
 monarchy, the rude stones of the great circle of Avebury and 
 the avenues of Carnac must have been erected several thousand 
 years before the Pyramid-Builders entered the valley of the Nile. 
 
 But it is now pretty well ascertained that the majority of these 
 structures in Europe and North Africa are post-Roman, and 
 none of them it is probable, almost certain, date farther back 
 than six or seven centuries before our era. Implements of iron 
 have been found in the very oldest. * 
 
 In 1854 the learned world was startled by the announcement 
 that traces of an entirely unknown ar^d very ancient population 
 had been found in Switzerland. In one of the lakes of this 
 country the first discovery had been made of the remains of the 
 early habitations of the Lake-Dwellers. Many similar dis- 
 coveries were afterwards made, not only in Switzerland, but 
 throughout Europe. Ancient piles were discovered, sometimes 
 nearly a quarter of a mile from shore, driven into the bottom of 
 the lakes, and numerous implements of stone and bone, with 
 fragments of pottery, animal bones, and other objects were 
 dredged up from the lake-mud. Agassiz exclaimed (and we all 
 know the caution of that truly great man) — Agassiz, in a lecture 
 before the Boston Natural History Society, as late as 1868, 
 exclaimed, that " Man was at last connected with geological 
 
 *See "Recent Origin of Man," chap, ix.; Archiv fur Anthrop., Januar, 1876, 
 s. 283, 284, 285.
 
 30 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Mtcseum. 
 
 phenomena!" and Sir Charles Lyell and Sir John Lubbock esti- 
 mated that this newly-discovered race had lived in Switzerland 
 at least 6,000 or 7,000 years ago. 
 
 But the antiquity of these remains also, like that of the Stone- 
 Graves, has vanished before more sober investigations. It has 
 been observed that the lake dwellings are delineated on the 
 great Historical Column of Trajan at Rome, which was erected 
 to commemorate the victories of that Emperor over the Dacians 
 in the year 114. They are also referred to by Herodotus and 
 Hippocrates, and in numbers of them Roman coins or tiles and 
 pottery, and swords of iron and bronze, have been found. Cru- 
 cibles for melting bronze have been found in the lowest bed ot 
 one of the very oldest — Robenhausen ;* and Mediterranean 
 coral and plants, as well as objects of glass or metal, have been 
 found in others regarded as being the most distinctively of the 
 Stone Age period. Indeed it is ascertained that these lacustrine 
 habitations existed at Noville and Chavannes in Switzerland as 
 late as the 6th century of our era: in another in the Lake of 
 Paladru, in France, a number of objects of the Carlovingian 
 epoch were found; and in Pomerania and Sweden it is now 
 known that they were occupied as late as the nth and 13th 
 centuries. t 
 
 The Shell-Mounds on the Danish coasts were cited too by 
 such writers as Lubbock and Lyell as memorials of a vague and 
 indefinite past. Worsaae estimated them to be so old that he re- 
 ferred them to the Palaeolithic Age, and Sir John Lubbock called 
 them post- Palaeolithic, meaning thereby pre-Neolithic. But metal 
 has since been found in one which appears from the extreme rude- 
 
 *Dr. Keller's Lake-Dwellings, ist ed., trans., p. 57; Quarterly Review, Oc- 
 tober, 1868. 
 
 fComptes Rendus, Acad, des Sciences, 1872, p. 204; Materiaux pour 1' 
 Histoire de 1' Homme, 1874, p. 320; Archiv fiir Anthrop., August, 1875; Dr. 
 Keller's Lake-Dwel., 2d Eng. edit., vol. i, 629.
 
 Man^s Age in the World. 31 
 
 ness of the stone implements to be one of the very oldest, and a 
 shell-mound in one of the Channel Islands, between France and 
 England, revealed, along with implements of stone, Roman pot- 
 tery and objects of iron. So that the Kjokken-moddings and 
 Lake-Dwellings as well as the Cromlechs and Dolmens, may be 
 regarded as tacitly withdrawn from the evidences for the an- 
 tiquity of man. 
 
 You are aware that a good deal of prominence is given in the 
 discussion of this subject to the recognition in Prehistoric 
 Archaeology of the Three Ages, to which I have referred — the 
 Age of Stone, the Age of Bronze, and the Age of Iron. These 
 distinctions have, however, been greatly exaggerated. As I 
 have already remarked, there was no Stone Age in Egypt or 
 Babylonia. There appears to have been no Stone Age in Africa. 
 Iron has apparently been known there from the most remote 
 times. There was no Stone Age from the River Kama in Rus- 
 sia to Lake Baikal in Eastern Asia — among the great Uralo- 
 Altaic or Mongol race.* Stone and bronze were used together 
 by the ancient Mexicans and Peruvians, when these continents 
 were first visited by the Spaniards, as they were by the ancient 
 Trojans, both before and after the period described in the 
 Homeric poems, f Implements of stone, bronze and iron, were 
 all found in the ancient ditches before Alise, in France, where 
 Caesar captured Vercingetorix and his great army.;}; They are 
 commingled in the graves between Trevoux and Riottier, on 
 the Saone, where Csesar fought with the Helvetii. § And within 
 
 * Epoch of Mammoth, pp. 219, 221, 229, 230, 233 ; Expedit. to Zambesi, by 
 Dr. Livingstone, pp. 561,562; Descrip. Socio!., Herbert Spencer, Asiatic Races 
 and African Races. 
 
 f Epoch of Mammoth, 232, 293 et seq.; Prescott's Conq. of Mex. I, 139, 
 441, 442; Conq. of Peru, I, 152; Schliemann's "Troy and its Remains," pas- 
 sim. 
 
 X Palafittes of Lake of Neufchatel, trans. Smithson. Rep., 1S65, p. 400. 
 
 i Napoleon III.'s " Life of Csesar," II, p. 65.
 
 32 Opening of the Leans Brooks Musenm. 
 
 a few years past in the great Merovingian cemetery at Caranda, 
 in the department of Aisne, in France, thousands of flint knives 
 and arrow-heads occur along with the iron swords and bronze 
 jewellery of the warlike Franks.* 
 
 Up to this point there is no difficulty. The evidences for the 
 antiquity of man derived from the Stone- Graves, the Lake- 
 Dwellings, the Shell-Mounds, or from any supposed high an- 
 tiquity for the Polished Stone Age, all fail, and are readily dis- 
 posed of 
 
 * Materiaux, 1875, p. 108. 
 
 The discovery of the flint implements in the Babylonian and Egyptian 
 tombs, along with implements of metal, shows at once that the flint imple- 
 ments in the European stone-graves, lake-dwellings, iv:c., do not imply a re- 
 mote antiquity. Of course the metals were much later in reaching Western 
 Europe than they were in reaching Egypt. Among the Swiss mountains 
 and in Britain stone implements continued to be used after the Christian 
 era. We know approximately the date of the Babylonian and Egyptian 
 tombs : when the primitive tribes moved from their Asiatic seats into the 
 forests of Europe, they left the metals behind them. They used stone in a 
 little while exclusively. They had no metal, and were too ignorant, weak, and 
 scattered, to find it and to work it. If the builders of the temple-towers of the 
 ChaldiEan plain used stone implements [along with metal], the hunters of the 
 Reindeer in the valley of the Vezere would use stone weapons exclusively, and 
 it would be long before metal reached their descendants. 
 
 This is illustrated yet more vividly by the relic beds at Troy described by Dr. 
 Schliemann. There are five successive beds, the highest being that of the Hel- 
 lenic Period, dating after 650 B. C. In all the other beds both stone and bronze 
 (no iron) occur. The Homeric Trojans were far more familiar with stone knives 
 than they were with metal knives. The chiefs of course had bronze armour, 
 offensive and defensive. 
 
 In the third bed (ascending) the implements are almost exclusively stone. 
 This was after the Trojan War — conjecturally about 1,000 B. C. Some of the 
 neighbouring tribes (ruder than the Trojans, but of the same blood) occupied 
 the site of the devastated city (there are abundant traces of a conflagration) after 
 the war. Perhaps they were settlers from Greece — possibly some Scythian irrup- 
 tion. But the fact remains, that in Asia Minor, at a period when there was an 
 advanced civilization from the Tigris to the Mediterranean — about the time 
 when King David reigned in Jerusalem — the site of Troy was inhabited by a 
 stone-using people. How was it at the same date in the marshes of the Somme 
 Valley ?
 
 Mans Age in the World. ' 33 
 
 There is a much more difficult branch of the subject — the 
 Palccolithic Age. Human implements (as is claimed) were found 
 by M. Boucher de Perthes in 1844 in the river-gravel deposit of 
 the Somme River in a geological position assigned to the drift 
 period, and in association with the bones of the elephant, rhino- 
 ceros, cave-bear, hyaena, reindeer, and other extinct animals. 
 Since that time a great many similar discoveries have been made, 
 and implements of bone, as well as stone, evidently prepared by 
 man, have also been found, associated with the same extinct ani- 
 mals, in caves, sometimes under solid floors of stalagmite ; and in 
 these caves there have been found also among the relics referred 
 to delineations on horn and bone and stone, some of them beau- 
 tifully executed, of the reindeer and other extinct animals. 
 
 The case of the River-Gravel is much the most difficult. In 
 that of the Caves the two principal difficulties are the presence of 
 the extinct animals and the floors of stalagmite — at Kent's 
 Cavern, in Devonshire, there are two floors, one beneath the 
 other, and both above the relics, and the lower one from 5 to 12 
 feet thick. The first difficulty — that of the extinct animals — is 
 common to the gravels and the caves ; the stalagmite, therefore, 
 is the special point about the caves requiring explanation, if it is 
 insisted that the relics are recent. At the meeting of the British 
 Association, in 1871, Mr. Vivian remarked that, at the present 
 rate of the formation of stalagmite, it would take 1,000,000 
 years for the stalagmite in Kent's Cavern to form ; and Mr. Al- 
 fred Russell Wallace and Mr. Pengelly assign to the relics 
 beneath the floors an antiquity of 500,000 and 750,000 years. 
 Lyell also lays great stress on these floors as an evidence for the 
 antiquity of man, as does Mr. John Evans. But more exact 
 observations have also reversed this verdict. Stalagmite is now 
 forming in the Ingleborough Cave in Yorkshire at the rate of 
 nearly one-third of an inch per annum, and Mr. Boyd Dawkins,
 
 34 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 who reported the fact, refers to the matter in his work on 
 "Cave-Hunting" as follows: "It is evident from this instance of 
 rapid accumulation that the value of a layer of stalagmite, in 
 measuring the antiquity of deposits below it, is comparatively 
 little. * * At the rate of a quarter of an inch per annum, 
 twenty feet of stalagmite might be formed in a thousand years." * 
 
 Similar observations have been made at the caves of Matlock 
 and Poole's Hole, and in the Gibraltar caves explored by Capt. 
 Brome, and there is at San Filippo, in Italy, a solid mass of 
 travertin (which is formed just like stalagmite) thirty feet in 
 thickness, which was deposited in twenty years, f The stalag- 
 mite, like the lake dwellings and shell-mounds, is, therefore, I 
 think, also given up, and we may confine ourselves to the pheno- 
 mena presented in the river-gravels. 
 
 The flint implements which are referred to man, are found in 
 a bed of gravel in the Valley of the Somme at a depth of from 
 15 to 25 feet from the surface, the gravel deposit itself sometimes 
 attaining a thickness of 15 or 20 feet, and being overlaid by beds 
 of sandy marl, angular gravel, and brick-earth or loess. The 
 gravels range from the bottom of the valley as high as 80 or 100 
 feet above the present level of the stream, and the implements 
 occur alike in the upper as well as the lower gravels. The val- 
 ley at Amiens is a mile or a mile and a half wide ; and you will 
 therefore perceive that when the upper gravels were deposited 
 the water of the river must have flowed 80 or 100 feet higher 
 than it does now, and must have rolled over points now half a 
 mile and more distant from the present stream. At this distance 
 from the river, high up on the slopes of the valley, twenty feet 
 and more beneath the surface, we find the famous flint axes of 
 St. Acheul. The age of these axes is that of the bed of gravel, 
 
 * Cave-Hunting, p. 39-41. 
 
 •j- See Lyell's " Principles" I, 399; also Le Conte's Elements Geol., p. 71-72.
 
 Mans Age 2?i the World. 35 
 
 In the valley bottom there is a bed of peat resting on the 
 gravel, which sometimes attains a thickness of twenty-five or 
 thirty feet, and which is of course more recent than the subjacent 
 gravel. In this bed of peat we find relics of the Middle Ages, of 
 the Roman and Gallo-Roman periods, and of the Age of Pol- 
 ished Stone. The fauna represented in it corresponds with the 
 present or recent fauna of the countrv. 
 
 These are some of the indicia of the vast amount of time 
 which appears to have elapsed since man hunted the mammoth 
 in this valley ; but they are not all. The theory of Sir C. Lyell 
 and Mr. Evans and Sir John Lubbock is that the river has exca- 
 vated this broad and deep valley since the high-level gravels 
 were laid down ; that the river, some million years or more ago 
 perhaps, ran some loo feet higher than its present bed, and that 
 it has gradually and slowly cut its way down to its present posi- 
 tion. Man was living when this work of excavation commenced. 
 
 There is yet another great fact implying the lapse of ages 
 since these axes were manufactured. There has been a great 
 change in the physical geography of the country. The French 
 coast on the north is now loo feet higher above the sea -level 
 than it was at that time, and so it is across the channel in Eng- 
 land on the coast of Hampshire. Indeed it is asserted that 
 during the Palaeolithic Age England was united to the Continent 
 — that the bed of the North Sea between England and Holland 
 was a great undulating plain, traversed from south to north by a 
 mighty river, which united the waters of the Thames and the 
 Rhine into a common trunk, and discharged them into the 
 Northern Ocean. Europe and Africa, at the same time, were 
 united by a bridge of land from Sicily to Cape Bon. Is it 
 strange that even cautious geologists, like Lyell and Evans 
 End Prestwich, and even Dana, with these facts before them, 
 should have received the impression that long ages, only to be
 
 36 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Afusetim. 
 
 estimated on the geological scale, have elapsed since the ances- 
 tors of our American Eskimo gazed from their primeval caves in 
 Europe upon these scenes ? 
 
 If man is recent, we have, as appears from what has been said,, 
 in connection with the presentation offered by the river-gravel, 
 the four following difficulties to explain : i . The formation of the 
 Peat; 2. The alleged excavation of the valleys, and the enor- 
 mous mass of gravel and loess deposited ; 3. The great change 
 in physical geography ; 4. The presence of the extinct animals. 
 I shall address myself briefly to these in order: 
 
 I. The Peat. — This, as stated, is sometimes twenty-five or 
 thirty feet thick, and lies on the gravel. Boucher de Perthes,^ 
 with the apparent concurrence of Lyell and Lubbock, estimate 
 30,000 years for the growth of this peat alone — which would only 
 take us to the Neolithic Age. 
 
 There are, however, some tolerably precise data going to show 
 that Boucher de Perthes' estimate is not correct. There are found 
 in the peat the undecayed and erect stumps of the birch tree, 
 three or four feet high. Now birch stumps, as Dr. Andrews has 
 remarked, will not endure exposure in a damp locality more than 
 fifty years without decay. 'Oak stumps would not last more than 
 a hundred years. The peat, therefore, must have covered up 
 these stumps before they had time to decay — that is, it must have 
 grown three or four feet in fifty years, which is six feet in a cen- 
 tury. At one-fourth this rate the whole thirty feet might have 
 formed in 2,000 years. A coin of the Emperor Gordian was 
 found in the peat at Groningen, in Holland, at the depth of thirty 
 feet, and in Ireland brass spurs, implements of iron, vessels con- 
 taining butter, shoes, and other articles, have been found at fifteen 
 and twenty feet.* In this very Abbeville peat Roman amphorae, 
 
 *See many instances cited in "The Epoch of the Mammoth," p. 307, et seq ; 
 Steele on Peat-Moss, pp. 282-85 ; Phil. Trans, of Royal Soc. of London, vol. 
 xxvii ; Sir W. R. Wilde's Catalogue Antiq. etc. in Royal Irish Acad.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 37 
 
 iron and bronze implements, objects belonging to the epoch of 
 the Lower Empire, have been found at great depths, and Lyell 
 himself, in his " Principles of Geology," mentions that a boat 
 loaded with Roman bricks was found at Abbeville at the very 
 bottom of the peat bed.* The peat, therefore, need not detain 
 us. 
 
 2. The Excavation of the Valley and the Beds of Gravel and 
 Loess. — I have stated that the English geologists believe that 
 man was living in the Somme and Thames valleys when the 
 high-level gravels were deposited by the rivers, and that he con- 
 tinued to live there and witnessed the gradual excavation of the 
 valleys by the streams. 
 
 Now the Somme Valley at Abbeville and Amiens is, as already 
 mentioned, a mile or a mile and a half wide, and about 200 feet 
 deep. The river is about 50 feet wide — one-half the size of the 
 Rivanna. From its source to its mouth its total length is 124 
 miles, and the fall is 1.77 feet per mile. When the alleged work 
 of excavation commenced, this little stream was running 140 feet 
 higher, on an almost dead level, and the fall per mile was then 
 about seven inches. The work it had to do was to sweep the 
 vast volume of chalk from the valley, roll its flints into gravel 
 and sand, and deposit these gravels all over the valley in beds 
 sometimes of 20 feet thickness. Some of the gravels are larger 
 than a man's head, and there are sandstone boulders weighing a 
 ton. Could a little stream, probably not more than half an inch 
 •deep, with a fall of seven inches to the mile, perform such a 
 work? To my mind it is just one of those hypotheses which 
 needs only to be plainly stated to be immediately rejected as 
 incredible. 
 
 The true source of the gravel and loess deposit which we see 
 
 * Lyell's "Principles," 12th edit., ii, 512. Antiquites Celtiques et Ante-dilu- 
 viennes (M. Boucher de Perthes), i, pp. 54, 155, 1S6, 201, 213, 447.
 
 38 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 in the river-valleys of Europe and this country, is the Palceolithic 
 Flood — what Dr. Andrews designates as the Flood of the Loess, 
 whose traces are abundant in India, and in the valleys of the 
 Tiber, the Rhine, the Mississippi, and the James, as well as in 
 France and Southern England. I think this is the almost univer- 
 sal opinion out of England. M. Boucher de Perthes himself 
 attributed the phenomena to a cataclysm. M. d' Orbigny, reject- 
 ing the theory of marine action, referred them to immense inun- 
 dations of fresh water. M. Dupont, in his celebrated Report to 
 the Belgian Government on the Belgian Caves, affirms as a mat- 
 ter not admitting of dispute, that the contemporaries of the 
 mammoth were overwhelmed by a deluge, which must have 
 covered nearly the whole of Belgium. So M. Belgrand (who is 
 represented by Prof Busk to have enjoyed unusual opportunities 
 for studying this subject), in his work on "Le Bassin Parisien 
 aux Ages Ante-historiques," remarks that the floods of the Palae- 
 olithic times were extremely violent, and that the amount of rain- 
 fall was so great that it rolled on the surface of the most per- 
 meable soils. * Prof Dawson of Montreal, Prof Andrews of 
 Chicago, and Mr. Alfred Tylor, F. G. S., all concur in this view, 
 Mr. Tylor propounding the theory of a Pluvial Period following 
 the Glacial Period. He observes that the Glacial Period must 
 necessarily have been followed in the region to the south of the 
 glaciated area, by a period of prolonged and excessive rainfall. 
 Prof Dana, in his Manual of Geology, describes at length this 
 great flood which was occasioned, he says, by the melting of the 
 glacier. Dana, however, makes this flood continue through the 
 whole of his Champlain epoch, which he believes commenced 
 immediately at the close of the Glacial Period. This Palaeolithic 
 Flood was in all probability merely a repetition of one or more 
 similar deluges which had occurred in the Glacial Period, when„ 
 
 * Jour. Anthrop. Instit., January 1873, p. 433.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 39 
 
 as we know, the land in England, Scotland, and Scandinavia, 
 was submerged from 500 to 2,000 feet, while in the valley of the 
 Danube the inundation mud is found at a height of 1,300 feet. 
 Le Conte likewise takes a post-glacial flood for granted, and, so 
 far as I know, the excavation theory as held in England is not 
 entertained for a moment by the geologists of other countries. 
 The mass of gravel which we see may have been brought down 
 by the glacial floods, and been afterwards only re-assorted by 
 the post-glacial flood. * 
 
 Such a flood accounts for the high level of the streams, and for 
 the deposition of the gravel and the river-silt ; and the only 
 question with which we are concerned is the date of its occur- 
 rence. The Somme River doubtless ran at this time 150 feet 
 above its present level, and filled its valley from bluff" to bluff". 
 The James River at Richmond was probably five or six miles 
 wide. You know that now in the course of a few days the Ohio 
 rises 60 feet at Cincinnati. The Tennessee River at Chattanooga 
 rose 5iji( feet on the 2nd of March, 1875. M. Reclus mentions 
 that on the 9th of October, 1837, the Ardeche, a small affluent of 
 the Rhone, at the bridge of Gournier, rose 70 feet above low- 
 water mark; and that in 1S57 it rose 60 feet. t The melting 
 snows and the extraordinary rainfall of the Paloeolithic Period 
 may have extended over several centuries, for I have no idea 
 
 * The point is settled by the high level beaches of the Great North American 
 Lakes. On Lake Michigan there are two ancient beaches, showing that the 
 water formerly stood at higher levels. Both of these beaches are post-glacial. 
 Now it is just as reasonable to insist that the basin of the lake has been gradually 
 excavated since the glacial epoch from the level of the Upper Beach down to its 
 present bottom, as to argue that the valley of the Somme has been excavated by 
 the river during the same period. Similar beaches exist on the other lakes of 
 this region, showing that, like the rivers, they too stood at a much higher level 
 during the prevalence of the post-glacial flood. See note at end. 
 
 f The Earth, p. 324.
 
 40 Opc7iing of the Lewis Brooks Miiseiim. 
 
 that the immense amount of the gravel and loess which we see 
 in the river-valleys was deposited in a day. * 
 
 3. The Change in the Physical Geography. — The next diffi- 
 culty to be met is the great change in the physical geography of 
 Europe since the epoch of the mammoth. I have mentioned 
 that it is alleged that when man appeared in Western Europe, 
 the bed of the German Ocean, between England and Holland, 
 was a wooded plain over which the mammoth and the rhino- 
 ceros roamed with the other palaeolithic animals. This is proba- 
 bly (but not certainly) true. I say not certainly, because there is 
 no evidence that man had appeared quite so early as this; the. 
 mammoth we know had done so, for the teeth and bones of this 
 animal, as well as those of the rhinoceros, horse, and reindeer, 
 are dredged up in vast numbers in the German Ocean, and have 
 been likewise obtained from the English Channel. There was a 
 sinking of this land, and a subsequent partial re-elevation, about 
 the close of the Palteolithic Age — the movement having proba- 
 bly been continued since. The whole movement of subsidence 
 and elevation may perhaps have amounted to 400 or 500 feet. 
 
 The English Channel and the North Sea between Holland and 
 England are quite shallow. An elevation of the sea bottom of 
 150 feet would, according to Prof Geikie, drain nearly all of the 
 German Ocean between England and the Continent. 
 
 This change in the physical geography of Europe, it is urged, 
 implies a vast period of time, and Lyell assumes that two and a 
 half feet per century is about the rate at which these elevations 
 and subsidences progress. A movement of 500 feet at this rate 
 would require 20,000 years. 
 
 These movements of the crust of the earth are familiar to 
 
 * There is another fatal objection to the excavation theory: the fauna of the 
 high gravel beds is identical with that (and so are the implements) of the lower 
 beds. But in the ages which must have elapsed, according to the theory, there 
 ought to have been a change in both fauna and climate.
 
 Mail's Age in the World. 41 
 
 ^geologists, and they were especially characteristic of the Glacial 
 Period. According to M. Morlot the region of the Alps sank 
 I, GOO feet during this epoch. At Moel Tryfan in Wales Lyell 
 identified fifty-seven species of marine shells in stratified sand 
 and gravel overlying the boulder drift, at the height of 1,390 
 feet. As is to be expected, such movements continued, though 
 with less intensity, after the Glacial Period, and are in progress 
 at the present day. The foundations of the old Roman docks 
 near Falkirk and Edinburgh, and the discovery of Roman pot- 
 tery and marine shells on a raised beach near the latter city, 
 show that the eastern coast of Scotland has been raised 25 feet 
 since the Roman galleys sailed into the Firth of Forth. The 
 shores of the Bay of Matagorda, on the coast of Texas, have 
 risen from 11 to 22 inches from 1845 to 1863. Along the coasts 
 of New Jersey the sea has encroached within sixty years upon 
 the sites of former habitations, and entire forests have been pros- 
 trated by the inundation. 
 
 In South America the indications of the elevation of the land 
 in recent times are very remarkable. Darwin found heaps of 
 modern shells on the Isle of Chiloe at the height of 347 feet. 
 He ascertained that at Valparaiso, during the 17 years between 
 1817 and 1834, the ground had risen 10 feet 7 inches, or 73^ 
 inches a year. In front of Callao, on the island of San Lorenzo, 
 at a height of 85 feet, he discovered in a bed of modern shells, 
 roots of sea-weed, bones of birds, ears of Indian corn, plaited 
 reeds, and some cotton-thread — relics of human industry almost 
 exactly resembling those found in the graves of the ancient 
 Peruvians, and presumably not more than some eight or ten 
 centuries old. A yet more striking instance is mentioned in the 
 article on "America" in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia 
 Brita^inica, where it is stated that, pottery has been found in a 
 marine bed on the coast of South America at the height of 150 
 feet.
 
 42 Ope7iing of the Lewis Brooks Miise^im. 
 
 Lyell gives a very interesting account of a buried hut dis- 
 covered in digging a canal, in 1819, near Stockholm, in Sweden, 
 at the depth of 64 feet. It was covered by marine strata, con- 
 taining the present dwarfish Baltic shells. He represents that it 
 is impossible to explain the position of this hut without sup- 
 posing a subsidence to the depth of 64 feet, and then a re-eleva- 
 tion to the same extent, — in all a movement of 128 feet. Now 
 near this hut several vessels of antique form were also found, and 
 an iroji anchor. * Iron was not introduced into Sweden before 
 the second or third century of our era, and, therefore, all of this 
 movement of 128 feet occurred in about 1,600 years.! 
 
 On the west coast of Sweden, in 1862, Mr. Gwyn Jeffreys 
 found recent shells, similar to those now living in the adjacent 
 seas, at a height of 200 feet above the sea, and Lyell remarks 
 that the date of this upheaval by no means reaches back to the 
 Glacial Period. | 
 
 On the coast of Norway the elevation is yet more surprising : 
 marine shells, of species now existing a few degrees further 
 north, have been observed here at a height of 600 feet above the 
 sea — showing that the west coast of Norway has been raised 
 600 feet since the seas of this region acquired their present tem- 
 perature §—600 feet, as I shall show presently, since the Polished 
 Stone Age. 
 
 These facts remove, I think, any difficulty which the alleged 
 changes in the coast lines and the interior lines of drainage might 
 suggest as to the lapse of time since the palseolithic flood. 
 
 * Principles of Geol. II, p. 187; Archiv fiir Anthropologic, August 1875,?. 
 
 17- 
 
 -{- 1 am not ignorant that a recent attempt has been made to explain this by a 
 
 land-slide. 
 
 \ Principles, II, 192. 
 
 \ Ibid, vol. I, chap, vii ; vol. II, chap, xxxi ; Antiq. of Man, 4th edit., pp. 63, 
 64.'
 
 Man's Age m the World. 43- 
 
 4. The Extinct Animals. — I remarked at the outset that if we 
 could fix the place of the mammoth in time, we could fix the 
 epoch of man's appearance. It is not astonishing that the appre- 
 hension of the fact that man lived in England with the Hippo- 
 potamus and the Elephant, and that the British Lion was a 
 veritable reality to the prehistoric Briton, should excite a feeling 
 of a vague antiquity — an order of things entirely beyond the 
 pale of such a chronology as our fathers were instructed in. 
 Think of the remains of the reindeer being found within a few 
 miles of London, and even as far south as the Pyrenees! and of 
 the musk ox, now confined to the Arctic circle, ranging in the 
 valley of the Dordogne within the human period, and that in 
 association with such representatives of a warmer climate as the 
 spotted hytena of Southern Africa and the lion and hippopota- 
 mus ! I do not wonder that the sober judgment of men like 
 Lyell and Lubbock was unsettled, and that the whole world, as 
 it were, has quietly acquiesced in the declaration that, while the 
 exact Umits cannot be fixed, the sojourn of man upon earth must 
 have been long. 
 
 A moment's reflection ought, however, to raise the enquiry, 
 Why should Europe constitute a continent apart by itself in the 
 absence of the great pachyderms and the great carnivorous ani- 
 mals, which are found, in whole or in part, in Asia, Africa, and 
 America? Why should the lion, the hyaana, the tiger, the rhi- 
 noceros, the elephant, not have crossed into Europe from Africa 
 and Asia? In the early stage of the human period, it is agreed 
 on all hands, these animals were found in Europe, and the im- 
 pression that such a time is necessarily extremely remote, is 
 simply an error, as I shall now proceed to show. 
 
 In the United States we are not unfamiliar with the extinction 
 of wild animals that were common a few centuries ago. At the 
 close of the last century the bison and the elk were found in the-
 
 44 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Mtcsenvi. 
 
 Kanawha Valley, and the bison and the great moose-deer were 
 both common in the valley of the Connecticut two centuries ago. 
 It has been the same in India. Three centuries ago, as we learn 
 from the public memoirs of the Mogul Emperor Baber, the 
 rhinoceros, the wild buffalo, and the lion were found in the 
 neighborhood of Benares, and the elephant abounded in the 
 jungles around Chunar. The elephant has not been known in 
 this region for a hundred years, but has been confined to the 
 forests of the Himala and the ghats of Malabar ; while the rhino- 
 ceros is extirpated with not even a tradition of its former exist- 
 ence. The lion was common in the desert region northwest of 
 Delhi in the memory of very old men now living, but " hardly a 
 tradition," we are also told, remains to-day of this formidable 
 animal." * 
 
 The Moa {Dinornis giganteus) of New Zealand has become 
 very recently extinct, as has the ^piornis of Madagascar, whose 
 &gg had a capacity of two gallons. These gigantic birds were 
 twelve feet high. 
 
 The extinct fauna of the palasolithic period embraced the Urus 
 (or Bos pri^nigeniiis), the Aurochs (or European Bison, identical 
 with the American bison), the Reindeer, the Great Irish Elk, the 
 Cave-bear, Cave-lion, Cave-hytena, Mammoth, Rhinoceros ticho- 
 rinus. Hippopotamus major, &c. While it is universally con- 
 ceded that man lived in Southern France with the reindeer, 
 some doubt has been expressed as to the contemporaneity of 
 man and the mammoth. But I shall not raise this question, and 
 conceding the co-existence of all the animals named with man, I 
 shall proceed now to show that most of them survived to the 
 Historic Period, and all of them to a period not far removed from 
 that. 
 
 The Urus and the Aurochs are both mentioned in the Niebe- 
 
 * Figuier's Mammalia, pp. 143, 148, 150.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 45 
 
 lungen Lied, and the traveller Bell mentions the former as exist- 
 ing in Poland in the 17th century, while the Emperor of Russia 
 still preserves the Aurochs in the imperial forests of Lithuania. 
 So much for two of the so-called extinct animals. 
 
 Great astonishment was excited when the bones of the Rein- 
 deer were found in the caves of the South of France, and great 
 emphasis has been laid on this, in connection with the alleged 
 change of climate, to show the great lapse of time which must 
 have occurred since this denizen of the snowy North constituted 
 the main support of man, where the consumptive now seeks 
 those soft and delicate breezes which rustle amid the vines and 
 almond-trees of Gascogny and Beam. It had been overlooked 
 that it had been recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga that the Nor- 
 wegian jarls of the 1 2th century used to cross the seas from the 
 Orkneys to hunt the reindeer in Scotland ; and within a i^w years 
 past the bones of this animal have been found near London, in 
 the Walthamstow marshes, associated with spear-heads and 
 knives of bronze. His remains have been, found also in the 
 ruined towers of Scotland, called "burghs" or "brochs," asso- 
 ciated with those of the horse, ox, and sheep. They are found 
 also in the Scotch peat, as well as in that of England* and Den- 
 mark, which belongs chronologically to the Polished Stone Age. 
 And, lastly, I may add that it is now pretty well given up that 
 both Caesar and Sallustf refer to the reindeer as existing in their 
 time in the Hercynian Forest. These facts setde this point con- 
 clusively so far as the reindeer is concerned. But you will ob- 
 serve that if we thus bring the reindeer down to recent times, 
 we create the strongest presumption, without going further, that 
 his contemporary in palaeolithic times, the mammoth, cannot be 
 
 *Brit. Quar. Review, April 1874, p. 346. 
 
 f De Bel. Gal. VI, 26; Fragm. incertK sedis, 18 Dietsch.; Excav. at the Kess- 
 lerloch, Alerk, trans., p. 11. Mr. Boyd Dawkins admits that the reindeer lived 
 in Germany in the time of Caesar. Cave-Hunting, p. 79.
 
 46 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museicm. 
 
 very far behind; we dispel the iUusion that the era of these ex- 
 tinct animals in Europe is very remote. 
 
 The Great Irish Elk {Mcgaceros hibernicits) was one of the 
 most superb animals among the gigantic fauna of this period. 
 Its height was ten to eleven feet, and the breadth between the 
 anders ten to twelve feet. It has been represented by some to 
 have been more ancient than the mammoth, but its remains also 
 occur in the Irish and French peat, sometimes in associadon with 
 objects of iron and bronze, and there is reason to believe that it 
 is referred to in the "Book of Lismore" as hunted by the ancient 
 Irish since the Christian era. It is indeed the opinion of Prof 
 Brandt that it survived in the marshes of Europe as late as the 
 14th century.* 
 
 The remains of the Cave-bear have been found in Neolithic 
 caves in Italy, and M. Gervais now identifies it with the present 
 brown bear of Europe. It attained a much greater size in ancient 
 times, and this misled the palseontologists to refer it to a distinct 
 species. The greater size of the ancient animals — the wild boars 
 and the stags as well as the carnivores — is now a recognized fact, 
 and is observable in the Neolithic as well as the Palseolithic 
 period. 
 
 The Cave lion is now admitted to be idendcal in species with 
 the Asiadc lion, and the Cave-hyaena is idendfied as the same 
 with the spotted hyaena of Africa, f The lion, we know, existed 
 in Thessaly in the dme of Herodotus and Aristotie, and indeed 
 as late as the beginning of our era. 
 
 All these animals, hasdly assumed by naturalists to have 
 
 *For evidence on this point, see Dublin (^uar. Jour. Sci., January 1865 ; Ibid, 
 1S64, p. 154; Wilson's Prehist. Man, 2nd edit., p. 37; Materiaux, 1S72; p. 
 534; Smithson. Rep. for 1865, p. 400. In one instance a leg of this animal was 
 found in a bog in Ireland with a portion of the tendons, skin, and hair on it. 
 
 f Prof. Dawkins in Pop. Sci. Review, 1869, p. 153; Prehist. Times, p. 285.
 
 Ma7i's Age in the World. 47 
 
 been long extinct, were the contemporaries of the mammoth and 
 the rhinoceros in Central and Western Europe ; as we have re- 
 marked, the fact that they have existed in historic times creates 
 the strongest probability for the recent existence of the great 
 pachyderms, for which, however, the direct evidence, as I pro- 
 ■ceed to show, is very strong. 
 
 In the Book of Job some great pachyderm — either the ele- 
 phant or the hippopotamus — is described as an object familiar to 
 the readers of that primeval drama. The crocodile is also de- 
 scribed. Now the crocodile has been ascertained within recent 
 years to be still living in one of the rivers running through the 
 ancient Samaria into the Mediterranean ; and the leviathan and 
 the behemoth of the sacred book were no doubt both well 
 known in Palestine when they were selected for the purposes of 
 illustration by this ancient writer. You will remember that, 
 speaking of behemoth, he says, " he trusteth that he can draw 
 up yordan in his mouth:" why "Jordan," if the animal was not 
 found on the banks of that river? 
 
 Among the pottery found in the relic-beds at Troy by Dr. 
 Schliemann there were various specimens moulded into the 
 form of some animal, and some light is thrown on the allusion to 
 behemoth in the book of Job by the fact that one of these ves- 
 sels of pottery represented the hippopotamus. This was found 
 in the bed above that referred to the Homeric Trojans, and as 
 there is no trace of Egyptian influence at Troy, the discovery 
 seems to show that the hippopotamus lived on the shores of the 
 Hellespont about 1200 B. C. The bones of the same animal 
 have been found in the bed of the river Chelif in Algeria, and 
 although now confined to Central and Southern Africa, it is well 
 known that in ancient (and even recent) times they frequented 
 the mouth of the Nile. 
 
 * 
 
 So among the specimens of pottery at Mycenae there was one
 
 48 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 containing a delineation of the elephant, which implies the exist-^ 
 ence of this animal, about the time of the Trojan war, somewhere 
 in the Mediterranean basin. 
 
 The hippopotamus is found nowhere in Asia at present, and 
 (except in Siberia) has never existed there during the present 
 geological period (the human epoch), as is generally believed ; 
 and Dr. Falconer, in his Palaeontological Memoirs, mentions it 
 as a curious fact that he was informed by the eminent Indian 
 scholar and author of the Sanskrit Encyclopedia, Raja Radha- 
 kanta Derva, that the hippopotamus of India is referred to under 
 different names of great antiquity, significant of "Water-Ele- 
 phant," and " Living in the Water."* The fact, however, is not 
 at all curious when our attention is called to the other fact that 
 Alexander the Great refers to the animal as inhabiting the banks 
 of the Indus in his letter to Aristotle, and that the naturalist of 
 that expedition, Onesicritus, makes the same statement, f 
 
 The most extensive and remarkable of the palaeolithic stations 
 in Europe is that of Solutre, near Macon, in Eastern France. 
 This was a sort of capital of the Cave-men — a tribal village — 
 where are found the bones of 100,000 horses, and innumerable 
 bones of the reindeer, with the bones of the mammoth, hyaena, 
 and other palaeolithic animals. The graves of "the artisans of 
 the drift" are also found here — the extended skeletons of these 
 early Mongoloid wanderers reposing at full length on the slabs 
 which probably constituted originally the hearthstones of their 
 cabins. X I mention this station merely to call attention to the 
 
 * Ibid, vol. II, p. 573-So. 
 
 f See Buffon's Nat. Hist., VII, 453, London, 1812. 
 
 J Mr. Boyd Dawkins is very loath to admit that pahuolithic man practised 
 burial, and is by no means candid in treating of Solutre. He tries to prove that 
 the graves are Merovingian, although the whole body of French Archceologists, 
 including M. de Mortillet, M. Cartailhac, Dr. Broca, M. Arcelin, etc., admit 
 their palaeolithic date. In 1873 the French Association in session at Lyons.
 
 Man's Age in the World. 49 
 
 fact that the horns of the reindeer here are so well preserved that 
 when placed under the saw they emit distinctly the odour of 
 fresh bone. 
 
 You are aware that in Siberia the fossil ivory is so little decayed 
 that it is the subject of a considerable commerce, and is regarded 
 as hardly inferior to the Indian ivory. But the fresh condition 
 of the bones and tusks of the mammoth in Eastern Russia and 
 diroucrhout Siberia north of s6° north latitude ceases to astonish 
 us, when we encounter, as has been done in a number of 
 instances, the almost perfectly preserved carcasses of the mam- 
 moth and rhinoceros in the frozen mud of the banks of the 
 great rivers, with the flesh in such a condition that it is greedily 
 devoured by the dogs and wolves. It is simply incredible that 
 any geological antiquity can belong to this flesh and bones — 
 there is no such example in palaeontology. 
 
 The preservation of the carcass of the mammoth in Siberia, as 
 Lyell has remarked, shows that the catastrophe which overtook 
 him was consummated suddenly. The animal was caught imme- 
 diately after death in the embraces of the frost before it had time 
 to decompose — and the rigour of the climate has never abated 
 since. Prior to this sudden refrigeration the climate of Siberia, 
 as proved by the remains of vegetation and the absence of the 
 reindeer during the sojourn of the mammoth, with the presence 
 of the tiger and the spotted hyaena, was comparatively mild. 
 The change in the climate corresponded probably with the close 
 of the palaeolithic age in Western Europe, and was due to the 
 draining of the great Asiatic Mediterranean, of which the Cas- 
 pian, the Aral, and the Black seas are the residua, and to the 
 elevation of the land. 
 
 visited Solutre, and it was unanimously agreed that the burials belong to that 
 age. Materiaux, 7th, 8th, and 9th livraisons, 1873. 
 
 It is especially worthy of note that the horse at Solutre seems to have been 
 domesticated.
 
 50 Opening of the Lezuis Brooks Mnseiim. 
 
 In America the mammoth and the mastodon roamed over the 
 continent together, and the indications of their recent presence 
 here — especially the mastodon — are such as to admit of no con- 
 troversy — I say, of no controversy. Their remains are found all 
 over the United States, and in Mexico, in the most recent and su- 
 perficial deposits, the bones sometimes protruding above the sur- 
 face of the shallow peat beds in which they were mired. " There 
 can now be no doubt," says Prof Shaler (who does not believe in 
 the recent apparition of man) " that a few thousand years ago 
 these companion giants roamed through the forests and along the 
 streams of the Mississippi Valley." * * " Almost any swampy 
 bit of ground," he adds, " in Ohio or Kentucky, contains traces 
 of the mammoth and mastodon." * In several instances the un- 
 decayed remains of their last meal have been found in the stomach, 
 and the bones of the mastodon, Dr. Foster remarks, have been 
 recovered with so much of the gelatinous matter yet remaining 
 in them, that "a nourishing soup might be extracted." f 
 
 I will only add that among the animal mounds of Wisconsin, 
 there is one near Racine, in Grant county, which is said to be a 
 representation of an elephant, and goes under the name of " The 
 Big Elephant Mound." \ A similar mound near the town of 
 Muscoda, in the same state, and which was traditionally called 
 the " Mastodon Mound," is figured in a book on the Antiquities 
 of America, published in 1858 by William Pidgeon, whose origi- 
 nal home was in Frederick county in this State, and who ex- 
 amined the mounds of the Upper Mississippi Valley in 1840. 
 
 These facts — and I refer especially to the preservation of the 
 carcasses of the mammoth and rhinoceros in Siberia, and to the 
 occurrence of the remains of the mastodon and mammoth in 
 
 * American Naturalist, Vol. V, 606, 607. 
 
 j- Prehist. Races of U. S., p. 370. 
 
 \ There is a cut of this mound in the Smithsonian Report for 1872, p. 416.
 
 Man's Ao-e in the World. 51 
 
 '<!> 
 
 America ordinarily in the most superficial deposits — constitute 
 positive testimony for the recent existence of these great animals, 
 and remove perhaps the most impressive circumstance which 
 seems to point to a remote antiquity for our race. 
 
 I have mentioned the evidence going to show the existence of 
 the hippopotamus in the Troad in the 12th century B. C, and 
 the delineation of the elephant at Mycenae. It has been 
 strangely overlooked in this connection that the "Voyage of 
 Hanno," which refers to an expedition fitted out by the Cartha- 
 genian government about 500 B. C, speaks of "herds of ele- 
 phants" as seen by this expedition on the northwest coast of 
 Africa, and that Herodotus, Strabo, and Pliny all attest the exist- 
 ence of this animal in Mauretania— just across from Spain — be- 
 fore and at the beginning of the Christian era. * Remains of the 
 African elephant have also been found in Spain, and in the Neo- 
 lithic caves of Gibraltar Capt. Brome found the bones of the Af- 
 rican lion, lynx, serval, leopard, and spotted hyaena. 
 
 From those eloquent records of the distant past, the slabs and 
 obelisks of Assyria and Egypt, a startling testimony comes to us 
 on this subject. From a representation on an Egyptian tomb at 
 Oournah, of the time of Thothmes III, t and from the stele of 
 Amenemheb, a military officer of the same reign, we learn that 
 the elephant was among the tribute brought to the Egyptian mon- 
 arch from Assyria about the period 1500 B. C.;t while from an 
 inscription on the prism of Tiglath-pileser I, in the British Mu- 
 seum, we learn that that great Assyrian prince hunted the wild 
 elephant in the valley of the Tigris about 1 1 20 B. C. § You see 
 
 * See Lenormant's Ancient History of the East, trans., vol. II, p. 263. Also 
 Herod., Book IV, \ 191 ; Pliny, Nat. Hist., Book VIII, chap. 11, Strabo, Book 
 
 XVII, chap. 3, \\ 4, 5. 7, 8- 
 
 f Birch's Egypt, p. 99; Smith's Ancient Hist, of East, p. 290. 
 
 JComptes Rendus del' Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 1873, 
 pp. 157, 165, 178. 
 
 \ Work last cited, p. 182,
 
 52 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Mnsejwi. 
 
 the pertinence of this: if the African elephant ranged along the 
 Straits of Gibraltar at the beginning of our era, and the Asiatic 
 elephant was found not far from the Hellespont in the 12th cen- 
 tury before Christ, is it improbable that a hardier species — the 
 mammoth of the North — found its way into Europe at a date 
 comparatively recent? 
 
 I have thus hurriedly passed in review the points usually relied 
 on to prove the antiquity of man ; the fact that the records of the 
 most ancient nations, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Per- 
 sians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Phoenicians, do not go back 
 further than a few thousand years before our era, and the limited 
 chronology of the Hebrew Scriptures, create the presumption 
 that man is recent, and the burden of proof is with those who 
 come forward to overthrow the belief established on these foun- 
 dations. Those who defend the short chronology have only to 
 show that the facts of Archaeology and Geology are not incon- 
 sistent with the lower figures. 
 
 There is only one more point that I wish to touch ; and this 
 presents direct and positive proof from physical science for the 
 recent appearance of man in Europe. The point to which I wish 
 to call your attention is the recent date of the Glacial Period. I 
 have not time to refer to the interesting observations of Prof. 
 Edmund Andrews on the beaches of the Great North American 
 Lakes, nor to those of Prof N. H. Winchell on the Falls of St. 
 Anthony, going to establish this fact : I desire to present a much 
 simpler and much more concise argument — one which all can 
 readily understand, and which seems to me to be conclusive on this 
 subject. If we can fix the date of the Glacial Epoch, we can fix 
 the antiquity of man's life in the world. Lyell contended as late 
 as the tenth edition of his "Principles" that this great geological 
 episode occurred 800,000 years ago ; in the eleventh edition pub-
 
 Man's Age in the World. 53 
 
 lished in 1872 he substituted 200,000. I am convinced that in a 
 very few years geologists will bring it down as low as 10,000. 
 
 The remains of Palaeolithic Man — the contemporary of the 
 mammoth — have never been found north of latitude 54° in Eng- 
 land, nor in Ireland, Scotland, Denmark, Norway, or Sweden. 
 In these countries the earliest traces of man belong to the Neo- 
 lithic or Polished Stone Age, nor, excepting a few cases in Scot- 
 land, and one or two in Ireland, have the remains of the mam- 
 moth been found in these countries. The reason for this is given 
 by Lyell ; * he refers it to the fact that when palaeolithic man was 
 living in the Somme Valley and the South of England, Scotland 
 and Scandinavia were still covered by the ice-sheet — the Glacial 
 Epoch still continued in those regions. So in the Archiv fur 
 Anthropologie,\ we read; "Neither in Scandinavia nor in North 
 Germany have we yet discovered the slightest trace of palaeo- 
 lithic man." " Scandinavia and North Germany were then 
 covered by the ice." 
 
 When the ice retired, man advanced; but observe, he carried 
 with him into Denmark and Scotland his polished stone imple- 
 ments — it was the Polished Stone Age when this advance took 
 place. The ice-sheet, therefore, retired from Denmark and the 
 North of England (perhaps North Germany) in the Polished 
 Stone Age. If we can fix the date of the Polished Stone Age, 
 we can fix the time when the Glacial Age terminated in these 
 countries. Now Archaeologists have approximately fixed the date 
 of the Neolithic Age at from 3000 to 7000 years ago. In Den- 
 mark Prof Worsaae places it at about 1000 B. C. It is the date 
 of the older Lake-Dwellings, of the older Shell-Mounds, and of 
 the Peat. My own opinion is that it was a great deal nearer 
 3000 years ago than 7000. I do not believe that it was earlier 
 
 * Principles of Geol., II, 360 ; Antiq. man, 4th edit., p. 295. 
 ■{■August, 1875, Correspondenz-Blatt, s. 18.
 
 54 Opcnhig of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 than 2000 B. C. We have thus (approximately) the date of the 
 Glacial Epoch fixed by Archaeology — a brilliant achievement for 
 this youngest of the sciences. And with the ascertainment of 
 the date of the Glacial Age, we bring the great cycle of geological 
 time, ere it springs backward into the Past, within the well-de- 
 fined limits of Chronology, and fasten immovably the first link in 
 human history to the striated rocks and ice-pressed clays of 
 Scandinavia and Scotland.
 
 Note on Evolution. 
 
 Beginning in the Lower Silurian the sub-class of bivalve shells known as 
 Brachiopods (Lampshells) has continued to the present day. Of all the genera 
 of animals now having living species only four or five, such as Lingula and 
 Discina, commenced their existence in the Lower Silurian. These have sur- 
 vived through all the geologic ages, and with the exception of Dr. Dawson's 
 Eozoon Canadense are among the earliest forms of life now known. They 
 belong to the venerable and persistent tribe of Brachiopods. It occurred to 
 Mr. Darwin that the history of these Brachiopods might throw some light 
 on the theory of Evolution. Mr. Davidson, of Brighton, the friend of Mr. 
 Darwin, has made the Brachiopods the subject of his life-study. In 1865 
 he received the Wollaston medal from the Geological Society, in 186S 
 the silver medal, in 1870 the gold medal of the Royal Society; and the 
 title page of his later treatises is covered with the titles bestowed upon 
 him by British and foreign societies. Mr. Darwin accordingly addressed 
 a letter to Mr. Davidson remarking that " several really good judges had 
 remarked to him how desirable it would be to exemplify and work out in 
 detail with a single group of beings, the gradual changes which took place 
 through the geological formations," requesting Mr. Davidson to make these 
 observations with regard to the Brachiopods. After some hesitation Mr. David- 
 son complied with this request. In a lecture before the Brighton Natural 
 History Society, published in the Geological Magazine for April, May, and 
 June, 1877, he gave the result of his investigations. The judgment was 
 adverse to the theory. I make the following extract : 
 
 " Darwin's tempting and beautiful theory of descent with modification bears 
 a charm that appears to be almost irresistible, and I would be the last person to 
 assert that it may not represent the actual mode of specific development. It is 
 a far more exalted conception than the idea of constant independent creations ; 
 but we are stopped by a number of questions that seem to plunge the conception 
 in a maze of inexplicable, nay, mysterious difficulties ; nor has Darwin, as far
 
 56 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Museum. 
 
 as I am aware, said how he supposes the first primordial form to have been in- 
 troduced. The theory is at best, as far as we can at present perceive, with our 
 imperfect state of knowledge, but half the truth, being well enough in many 
 cases a~ between species and species ; for it is evident that many so-termed 
 species may be nothing more than modifications produced by descent. It ap- 
 plies, hkewise, to accidental variations as between closely allied genera, yet 
 there is much more than this, with respect to which the theory seems insuffi- 
 cient. The strange geological persistency of certain types, such as Lingula, 
 Discina, Nautilus, etc., seems also to bar the at present thorough acceptance of 
 such a theory of general descent with modification. 
 
 " We have no positive evidence of those modifications which the theory in- 
 volves, for types appear on the whole to be permanent as long as they continue, 
 and when a genus disappears there is no modification, that I can see, of any of 
 the forms that continue beyond, as far as the Brachiopoda appear to be con- 
 cerned, and why should a number of genera, such as Lingula, Discina, Crania, 
 and Rhynchonella, have continued to be represented with the same characters 
 and often with but small modification in shape during the entire sequence of 
 geological strata ? Why did they not offer modifications, or alter during those 
 incalculable ages ? Limiting myself to the Brachiopoda, let us see what further 
 they will tell us upon this question. Taking the present state of our knowledge 
 as a guide, but admitting at the same time that any day our conclusions and in- 
 ductions may require to be modified by fresh discoveries, let us ascertain whether 
 they reveal anything to support Darwinian ideas. We find that the larger num- 
 ber of genera made their first appearance during the Palaeozoic periods, and 
 since they have been decreasing in number to the present period. We will leave 
 out of question the species, for they vary so little that it is often very difficult to 
 trace really good distinctive characters bet\\een them ; it is different with the 
 genera, as they are, or should be, founded on much greater and more permanent 
 distinctions. Thus, for example, the family Spiriferidcc includes genera which 
 are all characterized by a calcified spiral lamina for the support of the brachial 
 appendages ; and however varied these may be, they always retain the distinct- 
 ive characters of the group from their first appearance to their extinction. The 
 Brachiopodist labours under the difticulties of not being able to determine what 
 are the simplest, or which are the highest families into which either of the two 
 great groups of his favourite class is divided ; so far then he is unable to point 
 out any evidence favouring progressive development in it. But, confining himself 
 to species, he sees often before him great varietal changes, so much so as to make 
 it difficult for him to define the species; and it leads him to the belief that such 
 groups were not of independent origin, as was universally thought before Dar- 
 win published his great work on the ' Origin of Species.' But in this respect 
 the Brachiopoda reveal nothing more than other groups of the organic king- 
 doms. 
 
 " Now although certain genera, such as Terebratula, Rhynchonella, Crania, 
 and Discina, have enjoyed a very considerable geological existence, there are
 
 Man's Age in the World. 57 
 
 genera, such as Stringocephalus, Uncites, Porambonites, Koninckina, and sev- 
 eral others, which made their appearance very suddenly and without any warn- 
 ing ; after a while they disappeared in a similar abrupt manner, having enjoyed 
 a comparatively short existence. They are all possessed of such marked and 
 distinctive internal characters that we cannot trace between them and associated 
 or synchronous genera any evidence of their being either modifications of one 
 or the other, or of being the result of descent with modification. Therefore, 
 although far from denying the possibility or probability of the correctness of the 
 Darwinian theory, I could not conscientiously affirm that the Brachiopoda, as far 
 as I am at present acquainted with them, would be of much service in proving 
 it. The subject is worthy of the continued and serious attention of every well- 
 informed man of science. The sublime Creator of the Universe has bestowed 
 on him a thinking mind ; therefore all that can be discovered is legitimate. 
 Science has this advantage, that it is continually on the advance, and is ever 
 ready to correct its errors when fresh light or new discoveries make such neces- 
 sary." 
 
 If Mr. Darwin is thus driven away from the animal kingdom by Mr. David- 
 son, a no less eminent specialist in the department of Botany gives a yet more 
 emphatic verdict against him in that province of life: I refer to Dr. Carruthers, 
 keeper of the botanical department of the British Museum. In 'an address 
 before the Geologists' Association, of which he was then President, at the 
 session of i876-'77, he says : 
 
 "No doubt there is in the older Palaeozoic rocks a great absence of any 
 records of land life. But the evolution of the Vascular Cryptogams and the 
 Phanerogams from the green seaweeds through the liverworts and mosses, if it 
 took place, must have been carried on through a long succession of ages, and 
 by an innumerable series of gradually advancing steps ; and yet we find not a 
 single trace either of the early water forms or of the later and still more numer- 
 ous dry-land forms. The conditions that permitted the preservation of the 
 fucoids in the Llandovery rocks at Malvern, and of similar cellular organisms 
 elsewhere, were, at least, fitted to preserve some record of the necessarily rich 
 floras, if they had existed, which, through immense ages, led by minute steps to 
 the Conifer and Monocotyledon of these Paleozoic rocks. 
 
 " The complete absence of such forms, and the sudden and contemporaneous 
 appearance of highly organized and widely separated groups, deprive the 
 hypothesis of genetic evolution of any countenance from the plant record of 
 these ancient rocks. The whole evidence is against evolution, and there is 
 none in favour of it. 
 
 "The whole evidence supplied by fossil plants is, then, opposed to the 
 hypothesis of genetic evolution, and especially the sudden and simultaneous 
 appearance of the most highly organized plants at particular stages in the past
 
 58 Opening of the Lewis Brooks Aliisnan. 
 
 history of the globe, and the entire absence among fossil plants of any forms 
 intermediate between existing classes or families. The facts of pahvontological 
 botany are opposed to evolution, but they testify to development, to progression 
 from higher to lower types. The Cellular Algre preceded the Vascular Crypto- 
 gams and the Gymnosperms of the newer Palaeozoic rocks, and these were 
 speedily followed by Monocotyledons, and, at a much later period, by Dicotyle- 
 dons. But the earliest representatives of these various sections of the vegetable 
 kingdom were not generalized forms, but as highly organized as recent forms, 
 and in many cases more highly organized ; and the divisions were as clearly 
 bounded in their essential characters, and as decidedly separated from each other 
 as they are at the present day. Development is not the property of the evolu- 
 tionist; indeed, the Mosaic narrative— the oldest scheme of creation— which 
 traces all nature to a supernatural Creator, represents the operations of that 
 Creator as having been carried out in a series of developments, from the call- 
 ing of matter into existence, through the various stages of its preparation for 
 life, and on through various steps in the organic world, until man himself is 
 reached. The real question is,— Does science give us any light as to how this 
 development was accomplished? Is it possible, from the record of organic life 
 preserved in the sedimentary deposits, to discover the method or agent through 
 the action of which the new forms appeared on the globe ? The rocks record 
 the existence of the plants and animal forms ; but as yet they have disclosed 
 nothing whatever as to y^ow these forms originated."
 
 Note on the Post-Glacial Flood, p. 39, 
 
 The unceremonious manner in which the suggestion of a " PaL^eolithic Flood " 
 is rejected by writers on this subject in England implies a want of proper atten- 
 tion to the facts of the case. American geologists, at least, take a very different 
 view of the matter. Thus Dana remarks : " That the melting of the glacier 
 should have ended in a great flood is evident from the common observation that, 
 in cold latitudes, floods terminate ordinary snowy winters. * * * The fact 
 that such a flood, vast beyond conception, was the final event in the history of 
 the glacier, is manifest in the peculiar stratification of the flood-made deposits, 
 and in the spread of the stratified Drift southward along the Mississippi Valley 
 to the Gulf, as first made known by Hilgard. Only under the rapid contribution 
 of immense amounts of sand and gravel, and of water from so unlimited a 
 source, could such deposit have accumulated." Manual, 2nd edit., p. 553.
 
 Note on the Absence of Traces of PaltEolithic 
 Man in the North of Europe, pp. 52-54. 
 
 The argument for the recent date of the Glacial Epoch based on the absence 
 of all traces of the paliijolithic stone implements (and, with a few trifling excep- 
 tions, the absence of the paleolithic animals) in Denmark, Scandinavia, and 
 Scotland was published in " The Recent Origin of Man " in 1875, and although 
 there have been many notices and reviews of that work, no attempt has ever 
 been made to reply to this point. I do not think it can be replied to. If there 
 is any fallacy in the argument I should be pleased to have it pointed out. I 
 hive called attention to it several times since 1875, but to the present moment 
 the advocates of the antiquity of man continue to pass it over in silence. I 
 again call attention to it.
 
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