Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/604

586 from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than decline.

These investigations were supplemented by similar researches elsewhere. In many other parts of the world it was found that lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization, but all within a certain range, intermediate between the cave-dwellers and the historic period. To explain this epoch of the lake-dwellers history came in with the account given by Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave protection from the armies of Persia. Still more important, Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of the world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements and weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland.

In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and other countries, remains of a different sort were also found, throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds, and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward tendency.

At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, various attempts were made, in the supposed interest of Scripture, to break the force of such evidences of the progress and development of the human race from lower to higher. Out of all the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they exhibit the opposition as developed under two different schools of theology, each working in its own way. The first of these shows great ingenuity and learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall, in his book, published in 1875, entitled The Recent Origin of the World. In this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by the early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is the statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before modern archæological discoveries were well understood, that "Egypt laughs the idea of a rude stone age, a polished stone age, a bronze age, an iron age, to scorn."

Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late excellent Mr. Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of these chapters may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of Genesis, to insist that the only safety was in believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some inscrutable purpose, in a moment, set Niagara pouring very near the spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata, and sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding; scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did the vast multitude of things, little and great, in all parts of the world, required to delude geologists