Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/111

Rh to look back on the discussions of those days. While one class of objectors accounted for the configuration of the flint implements from the gravels by some unknown chemical agency, by the violent and continued gyratory action of water, by fracture resulting from pressure, by rapid cooling when hot, or by rapid heating when cold, or even regarded them as aberrant forms of fossil fishes, there were others who, when compelled to acknowledge that the implements were the work of men's hands, attempted to impugn and set aside the evidence as to the circumstances under which they had been discovered. In doing this they adopted the view that the worked flints had either been introduced into the containing beds at a comparatively recent date, or if they actually formed constituent parts of the gravel then that this was a mere modern alluvium resulting from floods at no very remote period. In the course of a few years the main stream of scientific thought left this controversy behind, though a tendency to cut down the lapse of time necessary for all the changes that have taken place in the configuration of the surface of the earth and in the character of its occupants since the time of the palæolithic gravels still survives in the inmost recesses of the hearts of not a few observers.

In his address to this association at the Bath meeting of 1864 Sir Charles Lyell struck so true a note that I am tempted to reproduce the paragraph to which I refer: When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the Glacial and Post-glacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in prehistoric times by investing the causes which have modified the animate and inanimate world with extraordinayextraordinary [sic] and excessive energy. It is related of a great Irish orator of our day that when he was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously toward a public charity he was persuaded by a friend to make a more liberal donation. In doing so he apologized for his first apparent want of generosity by saying that his early life had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and that ‘they who are born to affluence can not easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty out of one's bones.’ In like manner we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what seems so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the