E.—RECENT FACTS AS TO THE ORIGIN AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
Several recent statements as to new facts supposed to prove a preglacial antiquity for our species have been promulgated in scientific journals; but so great doubt rests upon them that they do not invalidate the statement that the earliest human remains belong to the postglacial age. I may refer to the following:
A very remarkable discovery was made in 1875 by Professor Rutimeyer, of Basle. In a brown coal deposit of Tertiary, or at least of "interglacial" age—whatever that may mean in Switzerland—he found some fragments of wood so interlaced as to resemble wattle or basket-work. Steenstrup has, however, re-examined the evidence, and adduces strong reasons for the conclusion that the alleged human workmanship is really that of beavers.
The Swedish geologists have shown that there is no properly Palæolithic age in Scandinavia, and that even the reindeer had probably disappeared from Denmark and Sweden before their occupation by man. Some facts, however, seemed to indicate a residence of man in Sweden before the great post-pliocene subsidence. One of the most important of these is the celebrated hut of Sodertelge, referred to in this connection by Lyell. Recent observations have, however, shown that this hut was really covered by a landslip, and that its age may not be greater than eight centuries. Torel has recently explained this in the Proceedings of the Archæological Congress of Stockholm.
The human bone found in the Victoria Cave at Settle, apparently under a patch of boulder-clay, has been regarded as a good evidence of the preglacial origin of man. It has, however, always appeared to readers of the description as a very doubtful case; and Professor Hughes, of Cambridge, has recently expressed the opinion that the drift covering the bone may be merely a "pocket" of that material disengaged from a cavity in the limestone by the wearing of the cliff.
The same geologist has also shown reason to believe that the supposed case of the occurrence of palæolithic implements under boulder-clay near Brandon, discovered by Mr. Skertchley, and paraded by Geikie as a demonstration of the "interglacial" antiquity of man, in accordance with his system of successive glacial periods, is really an error, and has no foundation in the facts of the case.
Mr. Pengelly has endeavored to maintain the value of the deposit of stalagmite as a means of establishing dates, in his "Notes of Recent Notices of the Geology of Devonshire," Part I., 1874; but, I confess, with little success. He urges, in opposition to the Ingleborough Cave, that at Cheddar, where, according to him, no appreciable deposit whatever is taking place on the existing stalagmite. But this, of course, is evidence not applicable to the case in hand, as in the Cheddar case no stalagmite crust whatever would be produced. There are, no doubt, crevices and caves in which old stalagmite is even being removed or diminished in thickness. He farther asserts that in Kent's Cave teeth of the cave bear and other extinct animals are found covered by not more than an inch and a half of stalagmite, and consequently that if this were deposited at the rate of a quarter of an inch per annum—the supposed rate on the "Jockey Cap" at Ingleborough—these animals must have lived in Devonshire only six years ago, which is, of course, absurd. But he fails to perceive that this mode of occurrence is quite intelligible on the supposition of a rapid decrease in the amount of deposition in the later part of the stalagmite period. He farther refers to the fact that the thicker masses of stalagmite, which correspond to the places of more active drip of water, are in the same position in both crusts of stalagmite. This shows that the sources of water containing bicarbonate of lime have been the same from the first; but it proves nothing as to the rate of deposit.
Mr. Pengelly's own estimate of the rate of deposit gives, however, a length of time which is sufficient to show that there must be error somewhere in his calculations. He states the aggregate thickness of the two crusts at twelve feet, and then, assuming a rate of deposit of 0.05 inch in 250 years, or one inch in 5000 years, he arrives at the conclusion that the whole deposit required 720,000 years for its formation. He is "willing to suppose" the mechanical deposits to have accumulated more rapidly; but allowing one fourth of the time for them, we have nearly a million of years claimed for the residence of man in Devonshire, which, independently of other considerations, would push back the Palæozoic trilobites and corals of that county into the primitive reign of fire, and which in point of fact amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of the whole argument.
Professor Hughes [154] refers, as a case of rapid deposition of matter akin to stalagmite, to the deposit of travertine in the old Roman aqueduct of the Pont du Gard, near Avignon, where a thickness of fourteen inches seems to have accumulated in about 800 years. Mr. J. Carey has given in Nature, December 18, 1873, another instance where a deposit 0.75 inch thick was formed in fifteen years in a lead mine in Durham. Mr. W. B. Clarke in the same journal gives a case where in a cave at Brixton, known as Poole's Hole, a deposit one eighth of an inch in thickness was formed in six months. Such examples show how unsafe it is to reason as to the rate of deposit in by-gone times, and when climatal and local conditions may have been very different from those at present subsisting.
In an able address before the biological section of the British Association in 1876, Wallace adduces the following considerations as bearing on these questions; and these are well worthy of attention as showing that it is the necessities of evolution rather than of geological facts that demand the assumption of a great antiquity for man, and induce so many writers to accept any evidence for this, however doubtful: (1) The great cerebral development of the so-called Palæolithic men, which shows no indications of graduating into inferior races. (2) The great variety of the implements of these ancient men, and the excellence of their carvings on bone and ivory, point to a similar conclusion. (3) Man is not related to any existing species of ape, but in various ways to several different species. (4) There is an accumulation of evidence to show that the earliest historical races excelled in many processes in the arts and in many kinds of culture. He instances the wonderful mechanical and engineering skill evidenced in the pyramids of Egypt in proof of this. His conclusion is either that the origin of man by development from apes must be pushed much farther back than any geologists at present hold, and I may add far beyond any probable date, or that he must have originated by some "distinct and higher agency"—which last is no doubt the true conclusion.
Haeckel, in his recent work, the "History of Creation," sketches the development of man from a monad, in twenty-two stages; but he has to admit that stage twenty-first, or that of the "Ape-like man," nowhere exists, either recent or fossil. He has to assume that this missing link has perished in the submergence of an imaginary continent of Lemuria, in the Indian Ocean; and it is instructive to observe that, after deducting this, his affiliation of the races of men, as indicated in a map of the distribution of the species, is in the main very similar to that with which we are familiar in ordinary collections of maps illustrative of the Bible.
The Post-glacial, Palæocosmic, or Palæolithic men of Europe are not improbably antediluvian; and as to their precise date we know little. As to postdiluvian man, Canon Rawlinson has recently pointed out [155] the remarkable convergence of all historic dates toward a time between 2000 to 3000 years B.C., or about the date of the Biblical deluge, which may reasonably be inferred to have occurred about 3200 B.C. He gives the following summary of historical origins as ascertained from the best data, and which accord with the representation of the Bible that in the time of Abraham the great monarchies of Egypt and the East were scarcely more powerful than the nomad tribe led by that patriarch:
| Oldest date of | Babylon | 2300 B.C. |
| " " | Assyria | 1500 |
| " " | Iran | 1500 |
| " " | India | 1200 |
| " " | China | 1154 |
| " " | Phoenicia | 1700 |
| " " | Troad | 2000 |
| " " | Egypt | 2760 |
| Sept. date of | Deluge | 3200 |
He rejects, of course, the fabulous chronologies of Egypt, China, and India as mythical, or referring to prehuman and antediluvian periods. It is to be observed that while these dates place the origins of the oldest civilized nations at periods considerably subsequent to the deluge, they do not prevent us from supposing that these nations commenced their existence wills an advanced civilization borrowed from antediluvian times, which is indeed a fair conclusion from the Biblical history, independently of the monumental evidence referred to by Wallace in a previous paragraph.
The Duke of Argyll, in his excellent little work "Primeval Man," in which he discusses the arguments in favor of primitive savagery advanced by Sir J. Lubbock in opposition to the views of Archbishop Whately in his lecture on the "Origin of Civilization," shows that there is no necessity to suppose a slow progress of mankind in the arts extending over indefinite ages; and his argument in this respect connects itself with the facts as to the high cerebral organization of Palæocosmic men referred to above by Wallace. In summing up one division of his argument, he truly remarks: "If we assume with the supporters of the savage-theory that man has himself invented all that he now knows, then the very earliest inventions of our race must have been the most wonderful of all, and the richest in the fruits they bore. The man who first discovered the use of fire, and the use of those grasses which we now know under the name of corn, were discoverers compared with whom, as regards the value of their ideas to the world, Faraday and Wheatstone are but the inventors of ingenious toys. It may possibly be true, as Whately argues, that man never could have discovered these things without divine instruction. If so, it is fatal to the savage theory. But it is equally fatal to that theory if we assume the opposite position, and suppose that the noblest discoveries ever made by man were made by him in primeval times."
I may add that this is true, however far into antiquity we may stretch back these primeval times.
Professor E. S. Morse, in his address to the American Association, in 1876, as vice-president, takes as a theme the contributions of American zoologists to theories of evolution, and closes with those which refer to what he modestly terms "man's lowly origin." These contributions he sums up under three heads, as bearing on the following points: "1. That in his earlier stages he reveals certain persistent characters of the ape; 2. That the more ancient men reveal more ape-like features than the present existing men; and, 3. That certain characteristics pertaining to early men still persist in the inferior races of men." Under the first head he gives contributions to the well-known fact that embryonic stages of the human being, like those of other high types, approximate to forms permanent in lower types. This is a fact inseparable from the law of reproduction; and as has been already shown in the text, absolutely without logical significance as even an analogical argument in favor of evolution. Under the second and third heads, he refers to cases of exceptional skulls and bones belonging to idiots and degraded races of men, as showing tendencies to lower forms, which as a matter of course they do, though with essential differences still marking them as human; and he assumes without any proof that these were relatively more common in primitive times, and that they are cases of reversion to a previous simian stage, instead of being results of abnormal conditions in the individual or variety. He sums up these arguments in the following paragraph:
"If we take into account the rapidly accumulating data of European naturalists concerning primitive man, with the mass of evidence presented in these notes, we find an array of facts which irresistibly point to a common origin with animals directly below us, and these evidences are found in the massive skulls with coarse ridges for muscular attachments, the rounding of the base of the nostrils, the early ossification of the nasal bones, the small cranial capacity in certain forms, the prominence of the frontal crest, the posterior position of the foramen magnum, the approximation of the temporal ridges, the lateral flattening of the tibia, the perforation of the humerus, the tendency of the pelvis to depart from its usual proportions; and, associated with all these, a rudeness of culture and the evidence of the manifestation of the coarsest instincts. He must be blind, indeed, who can not recognize the bearing of such grave and suggestive modifications."
Yet Professor Morse knows that there is no true specific or even generic kinship between man and any species of ape; that the phenomena of idiocy and degeneracy have no real resemblance to those of distinct specific types; that the resemblances of man to apes, such as they are, point not in a direct manner to any stock of apes, but in a desultory way to several; and consequently that, if derived from any such animals, it must be from some stock altogether unknown to us as yet, either among recent or fossil animals. Farther, as Cope, himself an evolutionist, admits, while we can trace the skeletons of Eocene mammals through several directions of specialization in succeeding Tertiary times, man presents the phenomenon of an unspecialized skeleton which can not fairly be connected with any of these lines. Lastly, his quotation from Fiske, with reference to the supposed effect of a protracted infancy to develop the moral characteristics of man, though accompanied with the usual unfair and unreasonable sneer (which a naturalist like Morse should have been ashamed to quote) against men "still capable of believing that the human race was created by miracle in a single day," is the feeblest possible attempt to bridge over the gap between the spiritual nature of man and the merely psychical nature of brutes.
It is plain that if American naturalists have done nothing more in favor of the lowly origin of man than that which Professor Morse has been able, evidently with much industry and pains, to gather, we need not for the present abandon our claims to a higher origin. It is farther significant in connection with this that Professor Huxley, in his lectures in New York, while resting his case as to the lower animals mainly on the supposed genealogy of the horse, which has often been shown to amount to no certain evidence, [156] avoided altogether the discussion of the origin of man from apes, now obviously complicated with so many difficulties that both Wallace and Mivart are staggered by them. Professor Thomas, in his recent lectures, [157] admits that there is no lower man known than the Australian, and that there is no known link of connection with the monkeys; and Haeckel [158] has to admit that the penultimate link in his phylogeny, the ape-like man, is absolutely unknown.
In Chapter XIII. I have not touched on the question of the absolute origin of language—this not being necessary to my argument. On this interesting subject, however, we have, in the naming of the animals by the first man, recorded in the second chapter of Genesis, not only the primary truth of his superiority to them, but a farther indication that the roots of human speech, other than interjectional, lie in onomatopoeia, and especially in the voices of animals, and that the gift of speech was not the slow growth of ages, but an endowment of man from the first, just as much as any of his other powers or properties. An interesting discussion of this subject will be found in the concluding chapters of Wilson's "Prehistoric Man," second edition. Farther, the so-called "tallies" found with the bones of Palæocosmic men in European caves, and illustrated in the admirable work of Christy and Lartet, show that the rudiments even of writing were already in possession of the oldest race of men known to archæology or geology. (See Wilson, op. cit., vol. ii., p. 54.)
I have not noticed, except incidentally, the alleged discoveries of very ancient human remains in America, as they all appear very problematical. There is, however, some evidence of the coexistence of man with the mastodon and other postglacial animals in Illinois and elsewhere.