THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.*
WHAT light does geology throw upon the interesting problem of the antiquity of man in Europe P No one is better qualified to answer this question than Professor Geikie, who bad already attacked it in his standard work on the Ice Age, and who returned to it with ripe experience in the Memo Lectures which be delivered last year in Edinburgh. He warns us against the glib facility with which some pseudo-scientists pretend to date the outstanding events of the geological record as readily as chronologists date the Egyptian dynasties—and with even greater divergence among rival schools. The nearest he comes to accepting any exact figures—if the word " exact " can be used at all in such a connexion, "if shape it might be called that shape bad none "—is to quote with favour Dr. Penck's recent opinion that the Glacial period in Europe may have extended over half a million to a million years. As the Chellean stage of human development dates back to at least the middle of the period, this would give "somewhere between two hundred and fifty thousand and five hundred thousand years for the antiquity of man in Europe." Others', however, only estimate the whole duration of the Pleistocene period at from one hundred thousand to four hundred thousand years. In all cases these estimates are based on data, such as the rate of deposition of sediment or of growth of stalagmite, whiah are exceedingly difficult to define with any certainty. But what is certain is that man is vastly older than wee supposed until quite recently. "When we reflect on the many geographical changes that man' has witnessed— the submergence and re-elevation of enormous tracts—the erosion of valleys and general lowering of the surface by denudation; when we consider that be Las lived through A succession of stupendous climatic revolutions; that he bat seen widely contrasted floras and faunas alternately occupying our continent—tundras, steppes, and great forests succeeding each other again and again—we must feel convinced that the few thousand years that have elapsed since the downfall of Babylonian. Assyrian, and Egyptian Empires are as nothing compared with the long aeons that separate the earliest times • The Antiquity of Man in Bump,. By James Gelb% Edinburgh: Oliva and Boyd. Lies. 6& net.] of history from the apparition of Palaeolithic man in Europe?' No one any longer thinks seriously of Archbishop Dasher's elaborate calculation that the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. At the very lowest computation, man was already endowed with some of his most remarkable qualities at least fifty thousand years ago. The spirited sketches which the prehistoric, hunters of the mammoth and reindeer bequeathbd to posterity leave little to be desired in the way of impressionist brilliance, and, as Professor Geikie says, "must ever be a marvel to critics who may have nourished the belief that such attainments are only possible in a civilized community." Countless ages must have passed in the slow evolution of humanity before this measure of achievemenit was made possible—ages only dimly revealed to our guesswork by the few fragments of bone and chipped flints that may come to light at Heidelberg or Piltdown.
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