History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

by Andrew Dickson White

Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of the caves and drift throughout the British Islands. The discovery by Colonel Wood, In 1861, of flint tools in the same strata with bones of the earlier forms of the rhinoceros, was but typical of many. A thorough examination of the caverns of Brixham and Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it still more evident that man had existed in the early Quaternary period. The existence of a period before the Glacial epoch or between different glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant, there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still exists in more northern climates, were found stone implements revealing some little advance in civilization; next below these, sealed up in the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which the remains of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth more frequent, the implements found in this stratum being less skilfully made than those in the upper and more recent layers; and, finally, in the lowest levels, near the floors of these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave bear and others of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone implements evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress. No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay without being convinced that there were a gradation and an evolution in these beginnings of human civilization. The evidence is complete; the masses of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils, implements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress beyond a doubt.

All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more important and more serious in its consequences to the older theologic view, which will be discussed in the following chapter.

But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of man. Remains of animals were found in connection with human remains, which showed not only that man was living in times more remote than the earlier of the new investigators had dared dream, but that some of these early periods of his existence must have been of immense length, embracing climatic changes betokening different geological periods; for with remains of fire and human implements and human bones were found not only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros, and reindeer, which could only have been deposited there in a time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, sabre-toothed tiger, and the like, which could only have been deposited when there was in these regions a torrid climate. The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass through times when there was arctic cold and times when there was torrid heat; times when great glaciers stretched far down into England and indeed into the continent, and times when England had a land connection with the European continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle regions of England.

The question of the origin of man at a period vastly earlier than the sacred chronologists permitted was thus absolutely settled, but among the questions regarding the existence of man at a period yet more remote, the Drift period, there was one which for a time seemed to give the champions of science some difficulty. The orthodox leaders in the time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a considerable time afterward, had a weapon of which they made vigorous use: the statement that no human bones had yet been discovered in the drift. The supporters of science naturally answered that few if any other bones as small as those of man had been found, and that this fact was an additional proof of the great length of the period since man had lived with the extinct animals; for, since specimens of human workmanship proved man's existence as fully as remains of his bones could do, the absence or even rarity of human and other small bones simply indicated the long periods of time required for dissolving them away.

Yet Boucher, inspired by the genius he had already shown, and filled with the spirit of prophecy, declared that human bones would yet be found in the midst of the flint implements, and in 1863 he claimed that this prophecy had been fulfilled by the discovery at Moulin Quignon of a portion of a human jaw deep in the early Quaternary deposits. But his triumph was short-lived: the opposition ridiculed his discovery; they showed that he had offered a premium to his workmen for the discovery of human remains, and they naturally drew the inference that some tricky labourer had deceived him. The result of this was that the men of science felt obliged to acknowledge that the Moulin Quignon discovery was not proven.

But ere long human bones were found in the deposits of the early Quaternary period, or indeed of an earlier period, in various other parts of the world, and the question regarding the Moulin Quignon relic was of little importance.

We have seen that researches regarding the existence of prehistoric man in England and on the Continent were at first mainly made in the caverns; but the existence of man in the earliest Quaternary period was confirmed on both sides of the English Channel, in a way even more striking, by the close examination of the drift and early gravel deposits. The results arrived at by Boucher de Perthes were amply confirmed in England. Rude stone implements were found in terraces a hundred feet and more above the levels at which various rivers of Great Britain now flow, and under circumstances which show that, at the time when they were deposited, the rivers of Great Britain in many cases were entirely different from those of the present period, and formed parts of the river system of the European continent. Researches in the high terraces above the Thames and the Ouse, as well as at other points in Great Britain, placed beyond a doubt the fact that man existed on the British Islands at a time when they were connected by solid land with the Continent, and made it clear that, within the period of the existence of man in northern Europe, a large portion of the British Islands had been sunk to depths between fifteen hundred and twenty-five hundred feet beneath the Northern Ocean,—had risen again from the water,—had formed part of the continent of Europe, and had been in unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers, lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly extinct, had left their bones in the same deposits with human implements as far north as Yorkshire. Moreover, connected with this fact came in the new conviction, forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depressions of Great Britain and other parts of the world were not necessarily the results of sudden cataclysms, but generally of slow processes extending through vast cycles of years—processes such as are now known to be going on in various parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former times were seen more and more clearly to be but a mere nothing in the long succession of ages since the appearance of man.

Confirmation of these results was received from various other parts of the world. In Africa came the discovery of flint implements deep in the hard gravel of the Nile Valley at Luxor and on the high hills behind Esneh. In America the discoveries at Trenton, N.J., and at various places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern edge of the drift of the Glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific truth yet more firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American authority is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice of Greenland extended to the mouth of New York harbour." The discoveries of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable contention by the adherents of the older view. As to these investigations on the Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries of Whitney and others in California had been so made and announced that the judgment of scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of perhaps the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1887. He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the statement that "both the actual remains and works of man found deep under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man existed in these regions, "valleys have been filled up by drift from the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and gravels." The immense antiquity of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared to be proved, "first, by the present river systems being of subsequent date, sometimes cutting through them and their superincumbent lava-cap to a depth of two thousand feet; secondly, by the great denudation that has taken place since they were deposited, for they sometimes lie on the summits of mountains six thousand feet high; thirdly, by the fact that the Sierra Nevada has been partly elevated since their formation."(187)

(187) For the general subject of investigations in British prehistoric
remains, see especially Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain and his Place
in the Tertiary Period, London, 1880. For Boucher de Perthes's account
of his discovery of the human jaw at Moulin Quignon, see his Antiquites
Celtiques et Antediluviennes, vol. iii, p. 542 et seq., Appendix. For an
excellent account of special investigations in the high terraces above
the Thames, see J. Allen Brown, F. G. S., Palaeolithic Man in Northwest
Middlesex, London, 1887. For discoveries in America, and the citations
regarding them, see Wright, the Ice Age in North America, New York,
1889, chap. xxi. Very remarkable examples of these specimens from
the drift at Trenton may be seen in Prof. Abbott's collections at the
University of Pennsylvania. For an admirable statement, see Prof. Henry
W. Haynes, in Wright, as above. For proofs of the vast antiquity of man
upon the Pacific coast, cited in the text, see Skertchley, F. G. S., in
the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1887, p. 336; see also
Wallace, Darwinism, London, 1890, chap. xv; and for a striking summary
of the evidence that man lived before the last submergence of Britain,
see Brown, Palaeolithic Man in Northwest Middlesex, as above cited.
For proofs that man existed in a period when the streams were flowing
hundreds of feet above their present level, see ibid., p. 33. As to the
evidence of the action of the sea and of glacial action in the Welsh
bone caves after the remains of extinct animals and weapons of human
workmanship had been deposited, see ibid., p. 198. For a good statement
of the slowness of the submergance and emergence of Great Britain, with
an illustration from the rising of the shore of Finland, see ibid.,
pp. 47, 48. As to the flint implements of Palaeolithic man in the high
terraced gravels throughout the Thames Valley, associated with bones of
the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, etc., see Brown, p. 31. For still
more conclusive proofs that man inhabited North Wales before the last
submergence of the greater part of the British Islands to a depth of
twelve hundred to fourteen hundred feet, see ibid., pp. 199, 200. For
maps showing the connection of the British river system with that of the
Continent, see Boyd Dawkins, Early Man in Britain, London, 1880, pp.
18, 41, 73; also Lyell, Antiquity of Man, chap. xiv. As to the long
continuance of the early Stone period, see James Geikie, The Great Ice
Age, New York, 1888, p. 402. As to the impossibility of the animals of
the arctic and torrid regions living together or visiting the same place
at different times in the same year, see Geikie, as above, pp. 421
et seq.; and for a conclusive argument that the animals of the period
assigned lived in England not since, but before, the Glacial period,
or in the intergalcial period, see ibid., p. 459. For a very candid
statement by perhaps the foremost leader of the theological rear-guard,
admitting the insuperable difficulties presented by the Old Testament
chronology as regards the Creation and the Deluge, see the Duke of
Argyll's Primeval Man, pp. 90-100, and especially pp. 93, 124. For a
succinct statement on the general subject, see Laing, Problems of the
Future, London, 1889, chapters v and vi. For discoveries of prehistoric
implements in India, see notes by Bruce Foote, F. G. S., in the British
Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1886 and 1887. For
similar discoveries in South Africa, see Gooch, in Journal of the
Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. xi, pp. 124
et seq. For proofs of the existance of Palaeolithic man in Egypt, see
Mook, Haynes, Pitt-Rivers, Flinders-Petrie, and others, cited at length
in the next chapter. For the corroborative and concurrent testimony
of ethnology, philology, and history to the vast antiquity of man, see
Tylor, Anthropology, chap. i.

As an important supplement to these discoveries of ancient implements came sundry comparisons made by eminent physiologists between human skulls and bones found in different places and under circumstances showing vast antiquity.