The Antiquity of Man

by Sir Charles Lyell

M. Agassiz, in his "Essay on Classification," has devoted a chapter to the "Parallelism between the Geological Succession of Animals and Plants and their present relative Standing;" in which he has expressed a decided opinion that within the limits of the orders of each great class there is a coincidence between their relative rank in organisation and the order of succession of their representatives in time.*

(* "Contributions to the Natural History of the United
States" Part 1.—Essay on Classification page 108.)

Professor Owen, in his Palaeontology, has advanced similar views, and has remarked, in regard to the vertebrata that there is much positive as well as negative evidence in support of the doctrine of an advance in the scale of being, from ancient to more modern geological periods. We observe, for example, in the Triassic, Oolitic, and Cretaceous strata, not only an absence of placental mammalia, but the presence of innumerable reptiles, some of large size, terrestrial and aquatic, herbivorous and predaceous, fitted to perform the functions now discharged by the mammalia.

The late Professor Bronn, of Heidelberg, after passing in review more than 24,000 fossil animals and plants, which he had classified and referred each to their geological position in his "Index Palaeontologicus," came to the conclusion that, in the course of time, there had been introduced into the earth more and more highly organised types of animal and vegetable life; the modern species being, on the whole, more specialised, i.e. having separate organs, or parts of the body, to perform different functions, which, in the earlier periods and in beings of simpler structure, were discharged in common by a single part or organ.

Professor Adolphe Brongniart, in an essay published in 1849 on the botanical classification and geological distribution of the genera of fossil plants,* arrives at similar results as to the progress of the vegetable world from the earliest periods to the present.

(* Tableau des Genres de Vegetaux fossiles, etc.
"Dictionnaire Universel d'Histoire Naturelle" Paris 1849.)

He does not pretend to trace an exact historical series from the sea-weed to the fern, or from the fern again to the conifers and cycads, and lastly from those families to the palms and oaks, but he, nevertheless, points out that the cryptogamic forms, especially the acrogens, predominate among the fossils of the primary formations, the Carboniferous especially, while the gymnosperms or coniferous and cycadeous plants abound in all the strata, from the Trias to the Wealden inclusive; and lastly, the more highly developed angiosperms, both monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous, do not become abundant until the Tertiary period. It is a remarkable fact, as he justly observes, that the angiospermous exogens, which comprise four-fifths of living plants—a division to which all our native European trees, except the Coniferae, belong, and which embrace all the Compositae, Leguminosae, Umbelliferae, Cruciferae, Heaths, and so many other families—are wholly unrepresented by any fossils hitherto discovered in the Primary and Secondary formations from the Silurian to the Oolitic inclusive. It is not till we arrive at the Cretaceous period that they begin to appear, sparingly at first, and only playing a conspicuous part, together with the palms and other endogens, in the Tertiary epoch.

When commenting on the eagerness with which the doctrine of progression was embraced from the close of the last century to the time when I first attempted, in 1830, to give some account of the prevailing theories in geology, I observed that far too much reliance was commonly placed on the received dates of the first appearances of certain orders or classes of animals or plants, such dates being determined by the age of the stratum in which we then happened to have discovered the earliest memorials of such types. At that time (1830), it was taken for granted that Man had not co-existed with the mammoth and other extinct mammalia, yet now that we have traced back the signs of his existence to the Pleistocene era, and may anticipate the finding of his remains on some future day in the Pliocene period, the theory of progression is not shaken; for we cannot expect to meet with human bones in the Miocene formations, where all the species and nearly all the genera of mammalia belong to types widely differing from those now living; and had some other rational being, representing Man, then flourished, some signs of his existence could hardly have escaped unnoticed, in the shape of implements of stone or metal, more frequent and more durable than the osseous remains of any of the mammalia.

In the beginning of this century it was one of the canons of the popular geological creed that the first warm-blooded quadrupeds which had inhabited this planet were those derived from the Eocene gypsum of Montmartre in the suburbs of Paris, almost all of which Cuvier had shown to belong to extinct genera. This dogma continued in force for more than a quarter of a century, in spite of the discovery in 1818 of a marsupial quadruped in the Stonesfield strata, a member of the Lower Oolite, near Oxford. Some disputed the authority of Cuvier himself as to the mammalian character of the fossil; others, the accuracy of those who had assigned to it so ancient a place in the chronological series of rocks. In 1832 I pointed out that the occurrence of this single fossil in the Oolite was "fatal to the theory of successive development" as then propounded.*

(* "Principles of Geology" 2nd edition 1 173.)