| 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.