Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/316

302 of the theological side as the Duke of Argyll has been forced to yield to the evidence.

Of attempts to make an exact chronological statement throwing light on the length of the various prehistoric periods, the most notable have been those by M. Morlot, on the accumulated strata of the Lake of Geneva; by Gilliéron, on the silt of Lake Neufchâtel; by Horner, in the delta deposits of Egypt; and by Riddle, in the delta of the Mississippi. But while these have failed to give anything like an exact result, all these investigations together point to the one great truth so amply established, of the vast antiquity of man, and the utter inadequacy of the orthodox chronology based by theologians upon our sacred books. The period of man's past life upon our planet, which has been fixed by the universal Church, "always, everywhere, and by all," is thus perfectly proved to be merely trivial compared with those vast geological epochs during which man is now known to have existed.

 

ILL recently Hooker, Payer, and others supposed that the interior of Greenland presented vast spaces free of ice, grassy valleys where herds of reindeer grazed, and popular legends were appealed to in support of this view. Nordenskjöld also suggested that the phenomenon might be explained by the action of the winds, which after crossing the inland ranges descended in warm currents like the föhn of Switzerland, and thus melted the snows of the valleys. But the systematic researches made in recent years have failed to discover any of these inland oases. The whole land appears, on the contrary, to be covered with a continuous ice-cap fringed by glaciers which move down the outer valleys to the neighborhood of the sea, or to the fiords of the periphery. The valleys themselves have disappeared, and, despite local 