EVIDENCE AGAINST THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.* THE controversy between science
and theology, which, in spite of some unpleasant features, must be valued as a great educating agency in England, has lately taken a somewhat interesting turn. Ever since Boucher de Perthes succeeded in gaining notice for his Drift Implements, writers on the Antiquity of Man have been speculating enormously on the geological evidence, some even alleging proofs that mankind has been in existence for millions of years. Sir Charles Lyell and Sir John Lubbock, whose books have had most effect in popularising the subject, gave prominence to several arguments of geologists and antiquaries which are open to attack, and which have been attacked accordingly from the scientific side. Writers of the conservative-theological party, becoming aware of these weak points, are now trying through them to refute the whole modern heresy of man's antiquity, and to reinstate the generations of biblical patriarchs as the authori- tative materials of primitive chronology. Mr. Southall, an American writer, has lately published a work entitled, The Recent Origin of Man, which contains a whole library of counter-evidence • The Recent Origin of Man, as Illustrated by Geology and :se Modern Science of Pns- Bleiore Areltssology. By James 0. Southall. Philadelphia : Lippincott and 00. London: Ttlibner and Co. and criticism directed especially against Sir Charles Lyell's Antiquity of Man. Students who already know enough of the subject to be able to pick out good from bad in a miscellaneous and uncritical compilation, may gain something by looking through this bulky volume. Inexperienced readers, however, should be- ware of it, lest they should be taken in by mares'-nests, about ancient Chinese colonists in Peru, whose descendants at this day can talk Chinese with the newly-imported coolies (p. 572); or the discovery in Louisiana of mammoth-bones coeval with cane- baskets and pottery of six different patterns (p. 322) ; or of a Phcenician inscription dug up in Brazil, recording the voyage thither of a party of Canaanites in the reign of King Hiram (p. 19) ! On the whole, the best part of the book is that which collects geological arguments for the " recency " of man. The same line of reasoning is more concisely worked out in a paper read this year by Mr. S. R. Pattison at the Victoria Institute. This flourish- ing Society, by the way, is becoming more open-minded than in its early days, and its discussions may eventually plant germs of rational inquiry in some of the most inaccessible regions of the religious world. -Mr. Pattison's paper is " On the Chrono- logy •of Recent Geology," and in it he endeavours to show that a minimum of 1,656 years before the Flood would be sufficient to take in the -period when Man was contem- porary with the mammoths, and his rude stone implements were buried with their bones in the Drift gravels and Caves. In one respect we feel compassion for Mr. Pattison, as we might for a man who was rich in his youth, and has since fallen into straitened circumstances. He once had a wealth of geological time at his disposal, which he is now compelled painfully to economise. Some years ago he wrote a little book, called The Earth and the Word; or, Geology for Bible Students, in which he reconciled Scripture and science on the basis that geology had no information to give as to the chronology of man, who only arrived on earth clear after the period of the great extinct mammals,— " sorely beset would he have been amidst the mammoths," &c. But now Mr. Pattison has to compress a Quaternary man-and- mammoth period, including immense geological and zoological changes, into a few antediluvian centuries. Theology compelling him, he puts his logical machinery to full pressure, and makes the monstrous squeeze. Being a practical geologist, we should imagine that he finds the result dangerously tight, but that is his affair. The real public interest of his paper, as of Mr. Southall's book, turns on the negative evidence they have brought together against the doctrine that man's age on earth must be some hundreds of thousands of years.
Let us try to picture before our minds the facts of the Drift problem. We are standing on a chalk down in France or Eng- land, looking into a valley a mile or two wide and some two hundred feet deep, the sides sloping gently towards the bottom, which is occupied by flats of mud, sand, and peat, through which winds a sluggish little river. It is evident at a glance that these bottom- flats are comparatively recent, belonging to times during which the river has flowed along much as it does now. The antiquities found buried in the peat and alluvium go back from modern remains to Roman coins and bits of pottery, and below them to objects of the neolithic or later stone period, such as polished stone cells. Thus the flats belong partly to the historical period, and partly to an earlier period not clearly known to history. As peat grows very slowly, and there are accumulations of it thirty feet thick and more in such valleys, we have here the geological record of what may be called the recent human period, which can- not have been less than four or five thousand years, and may have been far longer. But the problem of the antiquity of man turns on a series of deposits altogether more ancient than these recent flats. Unpolished stone implements of the palmolithic type are found with the bones of the extinct mammoth and rhinoceros, twenty or thirty feet down in the drift-beds of sand and gravel. These beds lie on the sloping sides of the valley, extending often up to heights of forty or fifty feet, and sometimes to a hundred feet, above the level of the present streams. They are altogether out of reach of possible floods, and were obviously deposited under geolqgical circumstances different from those of the recent period, which cannot in the least account for their formation. What these geological circumstances were is the question at issue. Sir Charles ,Lyell adopted the view that the drift-gravels were deposited by the ancient rivers, at first flowing at higher levels, and then continuing to excavate the valleys in the chalk down to the , present levels, fifty to a hundred feet lower. He follows Air. Prestwich in his theory of valley-excavation, and in connecting this with ice-action towards the close of the glacial period. The f presence of ice is shown by the great sandstone blocks derived from the tertiary beds above the chalk, which ice might have transported, but which the ordinary river action could hardly have carried. The former presence of ice is further evidenced by contortions in the beds of sand and gravel, which look as though caused by the melting of imbedded blocks of ice, allowing the layer above to fall in. It seems usual, for purposes of controversy, to represent Lyell's views as strictly " uni- formitarian," and to treat him as considering the great valleys to have been excavated in the chalk by such feeble river-action as goes on now. But, in fact, he was more wary, taking the benefit of any probable cause he could think of, such as ice-action, and the effect of estuary tide-wash when the land lay open to it by subsidence. Thus a good deal of Mr. Pattison's argument is directed against an imaginary antagonist. (By the way, when his paper is published, we hope that Mr. Pattison will verify his quotations, for the most telling passages on which he attacks Lyell are not to be found at the places in the Antiquity of Man from which his proof report quotes them.) Still, the gist of Lyell's argument on the Drift as bearing on man's antiquity is that man must have existed during the time while the last hundred feet or so of the valley were being excavated, inasmuch as implements lie buried in the drift up to that height, so that the human age on earth, as measured by the time required for such an excavation, would be immensely long. The counter-arguments to this are either to suppose the valley-excavation to have taken place in a period before man, or to account for it and the drift-beds by imagining the existence of geological agencies so powerful and rapid as- to require comparatively little time, or to combine these two- hypotheses.
During the fifteen years since the Drift problem has been before the world, the geological evidence has shifted in several places. For instance, those who remember the early discussions know that much was made to turn on the division of the drift-gravels into high-level and low-level beds, supposed to be distinct and separated by an escarpment of chalk, and marking two different epochs in the age of the valley. In 1867, however, Mr. Alfred Tylor brought before the Geological Society an accurately- measured section, taken for him by M. Guillom, the chief engineer of the railway at Amiens, which showed the supposed division to be unreal, the gravels being spread with apparent continuity over the slope of the valley. It is a pity that geologists have not yet come to the general use of exact surveyed sections, in place of the loose, uncertain sketches which are accepted as evidence. Lyell's section across the valley of the Somme, one of the most important in the whole controversy, and which appears even in the last edition of his Antiquity of Man (p. 153), is evidently not a representation of the facts. These really indicate that the drift-gravels belong not to two periods but to one, though that may of course have been a long one. Mr. Tylor further argued that the general excavation of the valleys in the chalk took place during times before the deposition of the drift-gravels, which he thinks were thrown down by land-floods and river-action during what he calls a Pluvial period, which followed the Glacial period, and was characterised by immensely greater rainfall, and consequently far more violent flood-action than at present. This geologist does not appear to have any theological bias, and believes in a high antiquity of man. But his geological hypothesis suiting the cal- culations of Mr. Pattison and Mr. Southall, they naturally lay great stress on the agencies it calls into play. Nor would geologists raise much objection to their doing so, seeing that for some years past men so qualified to judge as Prestwich, Belgrand, Evans, Morris, &c., have considered that, from whatever cause, the ancient rivers- and floods must have been on a scale far beyond that of the present little streams and freshets. The idea of ascribing the actual excavation of the chalk valleys to some period before man, so as only to leave to the human period the coating of their sides with drift-gravel, is by no means so generally acceptable to geolo- gists, though it is held by so considerable an authority as Principal Dawson.
The advocates of the "recency" of man have good grounds for- arguing that the slow scooping out of valleys and laying down of gravel-beds, which water does in the present condition of our globe, affords no fair measurement of millions of years for earlier periods of man's residence on earth, under different conditions of climate. But when these advocates pass from criticism to con- struction, and ask us to receive their views of early chronology, we see at once that these views are not really founded on geology, but are theological prepossessions defended on geolpgicsl•grohnds. We point out to them the peat-bogsandmud-banks of therecentperiod, representing a time during which little alteration took placein the land, the climate, and the existing animals. How long do you.
allow for this, we ask ? Four thousand years, they reply. Then we show them the drift-beds high up the hill-side, dating from a time since when the geography of Northern Europe has changed, the climate has changed, and the mammoth and rhinoceros, with the rest of the quaternary fauna, have disappeared and given place to the wonderfully different modern fauna. How long for all this, we ask ? Two thousand years, they answer. But why try to compress changes so immense into a time shorter than even your historical period ? Why not guess five, or six, or ten thousand years ? Of course, it is because of Archbishop Usher's chrono- logy, which prevents the geological evidence from affecting their minds as it affects the minds of pure geologists. These see that the geological work to be accounted for is so vast that, although great geological forces be supposed to have operated, the time re- quired would probably be long in proportion to the historical period. How, for instance, can an antiquity of six thousand years account for the laterite beds of Southern India, whose deposit belongs to a geological age so distinct from the present state of things that they form a high terrace or long plateau, through which the existing rivers have had to cut their way. Yet these beds contain human implements, rough quartzite hatchets, like those of the European drift.
It is not one part, but every part of the available evidence, which points to the conclusion that man's age on the earth can hardly be less than twenty thousand years, and may be far more. When the controversialists have, as they think, upset the geolo- gical proofs, it is only to entangle themselves in a new network of paradoxes about the origin of human races, languages, and institutions. The shifts they are driven to are quaint enough, as where Mr. Southall accounts to his own satisfaction for the popu- lations of the world, white, brown, and black, by the " striking observation " of Archdeacon Pratt, that " the wives of Shem, Ham, and Japhet may have belonged to different (antediluvian) tribes." Happily the educated world is growing impatient of this sort of trifling. The Victoria Institute will some day find out, what it does not yet see, that it is vainly fighting against the existence of a Science of Man. The six thousand years' chronology actually prevented any rational theory of races and languages, till at last geology thrust away this stumbling-block and left the way clear. If Cardinal Manning were to be made Archbishop of Canterbury, he might be able to stop it up again with a Syllabus. But it is of no use for any one else to try.
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