Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/129

Rh perience of the last few years countenances 's prophecy, that before long the dispute between the monogenists and the polygenists will die a silent and unobserved death.

IV. Antiquity of Man.—It was until of late years commonly held among the educated classes, that man s first appearance on earth might be treated on a historical basis as matter of record. It is true that the schemes drawn up by chronologists differed widely, as was naturally the case, considering the variety and inconsistency of their documentary data. On the whole, the scheme of Archbishop Usher, who computed that the earth and man were created in 4004 B.C., was the most popular. (See early editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica, art. &ldquo;Creation.&rdquo;) It is no longer necessary, however, to discuss these chronologies, inasmuch as new evidence has so changed the aspect of the subject, that the quasi-historical schemes of the last century would now hardly be maintained by any competent author ity of any school. Geology, notwithstanding the imperfection of its results, has made it manifest that our earth must have been the seat of vegetable and animal life for an immense period of time ; while the first appearance of man, though comparatively recent, is positively so remote, that an estimate between twenty and a hundred thousand years may fairly be taken as a minimum. This geological claim for a vast antiquity of the human race is supported by the similar claims of prehistoric archaeology and the science of culture, the evidence of all three departments of inquiry being intimately connected, and in perfect harmony.

During the last half century, the fact has been established that human bones and objects of human manufacture occur in such geological relation to the remains of fossil species of elephant, rhinoceros, hysena, bear, &c., as to lead to the distinct inference that man already existed during the ancient period of these now extinct mammalia. The not quite conclusive researches of MM. Tournal and Christol in limestone caverns of the south of France date back to 1828. About the same time Dr Schmerling of Lie ge was exploring the ossiferous caverns of the valley of the Meuse, and satisfied himself that the men whose bones he found beneath the stalagmite floors, together with bones cut and flints shaped by human workmanship, had in habited this Belgian district at the same time with the cave-bear and several other extinct animals whose bones were imbedded with them (Recherches sur les Ossements fossiles découverts dans les Cavernes de la Province de Liége,, 1833-4). This evidence, however, met with little acceptance among scientific men. Nor, at first, was more credit given to the discovery by M. Boucher de Perthes, about 1841, of rude flint hatchets in a sand-bed containing remains of mammoth and rhinoceros at Menchecourt near Abbeville, which first find was followed by others in the same district (see Boucher de Perthes, De l'Industrie Primitive, ou les Arts à leur Origine, 1846; Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes,, 1847, &c.); between 1850 and 1860 competent French and English geologists, among them Bigollot, Falconer, Prestwich, and Evans, were induced to examine into the facts, and found the evidence irresistible that man existed and used rude implements of chipped flint during the Quaternary or Drift period. Further investigations were now made, and overlooked results of older ones reviewed. In describing Kent's Hole, near Torquay, Mr Godwin-Austen had maintained, as early as 1840 (Proc. Geo. Soc. London, vol. iii. p. 286), that the human bones and worked flints had been deposited indiscriminately together with the remains of fossil elephant, rhinoceros, &c.; a minute exploration of this cavern has since been carried on under the superintendence of Messrs Vivian, Pengelly, and others, fully justifying Mr Godwin-Austen s early remark, that &quot; there is no undefined reason why man and the several animals whose remains occur in caves and in gravel should not have lived here at some remote time&quot; (see Pengelly, &ldquo;Literature of Kent's Cavern,&rdquo; in Trans. Devonshire Association, 1868). Especially certain caves and rock-shelters in the province of Dordogne, in central France, were examined by a French and an English archaeologist, Mons. Edouard Lartet and Mr Henry Christy, the remains discovered showing the former prevalence of the rein-deer in this region, at that time inhabited by savages, whose bone and stone implements indicate a habit of life similar to that of the Esquimaux. Moreover, the co-existence of man with a fauna now extinct or confined to other districts was brought to yet clearer demonstration, by the discovery in these caves of certain drawings and carvings of the animals done by the ancient inhabitants them selves, such as a group of rein-deer on a piece of rein-deer horn, and a sketch of a mammoth, showing this elephant's long hair, on a piece of a mammoth s tusk from La Madeleine (Lartet and Christy, Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ, ed. by T. R. Jones, London, 1865, &c.) These are among the earliest and principal of a series of discoveries of human relics be longing to what may be termed geological antiquity, with which should be mentioned Mr Boyd Dawkins's examination of the hyæna den of Wokey Hole, Dr Lund s researches in the caves of Brazil, those in the south of France by the Marquis de Vibraye and MM. Garrigou and Filhol, those in Sicily by Dr Falconer, and Mr Bruce Foote s discovery of rude quartzite implements in the laterite of India. Fuller details of the general subject will be found in Sir C. Lyell's Antiquity of Man, 4th ed., London, 1873; Sir John Lubbock's Prehistoric Times, 3d ed., London, 1873; Dr H. Falconer's Palæolontological Memoirs, London, 1868; the volumes of Proceedings of the International Congress of Prehistoric Archæology; and the periodical Matériaux pour l'Histoire Primitive et Naturelle de l'Homme, edited at first by De Mortillet, and since by Trutat and Cartailhac.

This evidence is now generally accepted by geologists as Antiquity carrying back the existence of man into the period of the f Quatcr- post-glacial drift, in what is now called the Quaternary nary Man&amp;gt; period. That this indicates an antiquity at least of tens of thousands of years may be judged in several ways. The very position in which these rude instruments were found showed that they belonged to a time quite separate from that of history. Thus, at St Acheul flint hatchets occur in a gravel-bed immediately overlying the chalk, which bed is covered by some 12 feet of sand and marl, capped by a layer of soil, which is shown by graves of the Gallo-Roman period to have been hardly altered during the last 1500 years. This distinction between the drift deposits and those containing relics of historic ages is, as a general rule, evident at a glance. ISText, the succession of ages to which different classes of remains belong is well marked; the drift implements belong to the palaeolithic or old stone age, when as yet the implements were extremely rude, and not ground or polished; above these in deposit, and therefore later in time, come the artistically shaped and polished celts of the neolithic or new stone age ; above these, again, relics of the bronze and early iron ages, with which historical antiquity in Europe begins. Again, the animals of the Quaternary period, whose bones are found with the rude stone implements, comprise several species of mammalia which have since become extinct, such as the mammoth, the hairy rhinoceros, and the Irish elk, while others, such as the rein-deer and musk-ox, now only inhabit remote districts. It is generally considered that such a fauna indicates, at any rate during part of the Quaternary period, a severer climate than now prevails in France and England. This difference from the present conditions seems to confirm the view, that the twenty centuries of French and English history form but a fraction of the timo 