(b.) In all ages of the world men have been liable to fall into rock-fissures and ravines and to die there; and to leave their skeletons to become fossil there, particularlyin calcareous and similar rocks where decomposition or solution in water and new deposits are in progress;
(c.) Men have been wont to frequent caves for shelter, for safety in war or from persecution, and consequently might leave their bones there; or
(d.) Their bones may have been dragged into caverns by flesh-eating animals or borne into strange positions by underground currents of water; or again,
(e.) Since the historic Adam, drift deposits have in some circumstances been forming under water, in which waters men have been liable to be drowned and their skeletons to become imbedded in those deposits. Changes of elevation may bring such deposits to view.
Such possibilities must practically nullify confidence in the proof of man’s high antiquity from his bones so long as the specimens are so exceedingly few and even these few found only quite near the surface.
This argument will be appreciated by those who duly consider, on the one hand, that if man were on the earth in those pre-Adamic ages, it is in the highest degree improbable that his population ranged at a dozen for the area of all France, and a few hundreds only to a continent—for what should forbid him as well as the lower animals to “be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth”? Besides, a population so sparse and consequently weak could have made no stand against armies of hyenas, leopards, bears and lions.——On the other hand, the occurrence of human bones, in numbers so very few and so remote from each other, will be much more rationally accounted for by the possibilities above indicated.
Yet let it be understood:—The way is open for any extent of further investigation. We have no occasion to fear the result of the search. Let the rocks be torn up and examined; let mountains be tunneled and canals be dug; let railroad grading go where it will; if the human skeleton should be found where none of these or similar possibilities admit its date since Adam, we will certainly give the case all due consideration and weight.
(B.) Next is the argument from man’s work and from his tools.
Here a larger field opens. My limits scarcely allow me to do more than indicate briefly the present state of the question.——Thus far explorations have been mostly restricted to Northern and Western Europe, say north of the Alps and of ancient Greece, in the regions anciently known as Gaul, Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. The supposed remains of man’s tools and work are found chiefly in caves and lake-dwellings, or under drift, and only to a small extent in monuments above the present surface. The lake-dwellings specially referred to are in Switzerland, where during the very dry winter of 1853–4 several remarkable villages were found built on piles below, the present average watermark, which were once without doubt the abodes of men,with quite abundant traces indicating their modes of life, civilization, implements, and the contemporary animal races.[13]
The various stages of civilization developed in these ancient remains have been usually classified under three heads: