The Origin of the World According to Revelation and Science

by Sir John William Dawson

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: