[65] Abridged from Lyell's summary: "Principles of Geology," chap. vii.
CHAPTER VI.
EIGHT YEARS OF QUIET PROGRESS.
Both courses of lectures ended[66] and the third volume of the "Principles" successfully launched, Mr. and Mrs. Lyell left London in June, 1833, for another Continental tour. During their first halt, at Paris, she was duly introduced to the famous quarries of Montmartre, and had an opportunity of "collecting a fossil shell or two for the first time." Thence they made their way to Bonn, which she had left as a bride the previous summer, and, after another short halt, proceeded up the gorge of the Rhine to Bingen, visiting on the way the ironworks at Sayn, and examining the stratified volcanic deposits on the plain between the river and that town. The Tertiary basin at Mayence was next visited, and from it they went leisurely to Heidelberg. From the picturesque old town by the Neckar they struck off to Stuttgart and to Pappenheim, examining one or two collections at the former place, and the quarries of Solenhofen, near the latter. These were already noted for the abundant and well-preserved fossils obtained in the quarries worked for the well-known "lithographic stone," though the famous Archæopteryx had yet to be found; that strange creature, feathered and like a bird, but with teeth in its beak and a tail like a reptile, which has supplied such an important link in the chain of evidence in favour of progressive development. Thence they travelled to Nürnberg and Bayreuth, visiting on their way the noted caves at Muggendorf, and returned to Bonn by way of Bamberg, Würtzburg, Aschaffenberg, and Frankfurt. In this journey, few localities of special interest were investigated, but, as Lyell's letters show, no opportunity was lost of discussing important questions with local geologists, or of examining sections in the field. But on the way back to England through Belgium a halt was made at Liége, to inspect Dr. Schmerling's grand collection of cave-remains. It is evident, though but a short notice of it has been preserved, that this visit kindled an enthusiasm which was to produce important results in later years. Lyell writes (to Mantell, after his return to England):—
"I saw at Liége the collection of Dr. Schmerling, who in three years has, by his own exertion and the incessant labours of a clever amateur servant, cleared out some twenty caves untouched by any previous searcher, and has filled a truly splendid museum. He numbers already thrice the number of fossil cavern mammalia known when Buckland wrote his 'Idola Specus'; and such is the prodigious number of the individuals of some species—the bears, for example, of which he has five species, one large, one new—that several entire skeletons will be constructed. Oh, that the Lewes chalk had been cavernous! And he has these, and a number of yet unexplored and shortly to be investigated holes, all to himself: but envy him not—you cannot imagine what he feels at being far from a metropolis which can afford him sympathy; and having not one congenial soul at Liége, and none who take any interest in his discoveries save the priests—and what kind they take you may guess, more especially as he has found human remains in breccia, embedded with the extinct species, under circumstances far more difficult to get over than any I have previously heard of. The three coats or layers of stalagmite cited by me at Choquier are quite true."[67]
Very probably among these human relics was one which was destined to become famous—the skull found in the cave at Engis—for this was described by Dr. Schmerling in his "Recherches sur les ossements fossiles découverts dans les cavernes de la Province de Liége," a book published in 1833. It was found at a depth of nearly five feet, hidden under an osseous breccia, composed of the remains of small animals, and containing one rhinoceros tusk with several teeth of horses and of ruminants. The earth in which it was lying did not show the slightest trace of disturbance, and teeth of rhinoceros, horse, hyæna, and bear surrounded it on all sides.[68] This relic proved—and since then numbers of similar cases have been discovered—that if the man of Engis were an antediluvian, and his corpse had been washed into the cave together with the drowned bodies of rhinoceros, and other animals,[69] that event, at any rate, must have corresponded with a great change in the habits of the larger mammalia, for they had been unable to return to haunts which once had been congenial. In other words, the foundation was being laid, now in 1833, for the next great advance in geological science, the contemporaneity of man and several extinct species of mammals, indicating, of course, the antiquity of the human race. To this point, however, public attention was not directed for nearly twenty years. Then various causes, especially an examination into the evidence discovered in the neighbourhood of Abbeville and Amiens by M. Boucher de Perthes, brought the question to the front. But though the controversy was sharp and bitter for a time, it was speedily over, and the question which is still agitated—though mildly and in a sense wholly scientific—is whether man appeared in this part of Europe and in corresponding regions of North America, before, during, or after the glacial epoch?
But the Engis skull is a relic exceptionally interesting. Though the handiwork of primæval man is common enough—rudely chipped instruments or weapons of flint or other stone, worked portions of bones and antlers, and such like—yet his bones are far less common than those of other mammals, and, most of all, skulls are rare. Professor Huxley, in his work from which we have already quoted, states that Dr. Schmerling found a bone implement in the Engis cave, and worked flints in all the ossiferous Belgian caves, yet this was the only skull in anything like a perfect condition, though another cavern furnished two fragments of parietal bones. Yet from the latter numerous bones of the extremities were obtained, and these had belonged to three individuals. What inferences, then, can be drawn from this skull as to the intellectual rank of primæval man? This question was discussed by its discoverer, and the evidence has been also considered by Professor Huxley. The former thus expressed his opinion, "that this cranium has belonged to a person of limited intellectual faculties, and we conclude thence that it belonged to a man of a low degree of civilisation; a deduction which is borne out by contrasting the capacity of the frontal with that of the occipital region." Professor Huxley sums up a careful discussion of the evidence, in which he calls special attention to points where it happens to be defective, by stating that the specimen agrees in certain respects with Australian skulls, in others with some European, but that he can find in the remains no character which, if it were a recent skull, would give any trustworthy clue to the race to which it might appertain. "Assuredly there is no mark of degradation about any part of its structure. It is, in fact, a fair average human skull, which might have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage."[70]
The winter of 1833 and the spring of the following year were spent in London. It was evidently a busy, though uneventful, time: a new edition of the "Principles" was being prepared and printed, a paper read to the Geological Society on a freshwater formation at Cerdagne in the Pyrenees, and information collected for a summer's journey. This was to be in a new direction—to Scandinavia—with the more especial intent of studying the evidence on which it has been asserted that the shores of the Baltic had changed their level within recent times. But on this occasion Mrs. Lyell remained at home, as the travelling might occasionally have been too rough for her so we find, in a journal written for her perusal, a full sketch of a tour which proved, as he had anticipated, to be fruitful in scientific results. His first halt was at Hamburg, where, on his arrival, with characteristic energy he dashed off at once in a carriage to examine a section below Altona which he had marked down on his voyage up the Elbe. This is his brief summary: "Cliffs sixty or seventy feet high. Filled three pages of note-book. Saw the source of the great Holstein granite blocks. Gathered shells thrown ashore by the Elbe." From Hamburg he drove to Lübeck, along one of the worst of roads. The primary cause of its badness was geological—a loose sand interspersed with granite boulders; the secondary, the royal revenues; for these largely depended on the tolls paid by vessels on entering the sound, and if a good road had connected the two towns much merchandise would have gone overland, to the king's loss. At Lübeck Lyell for the first time stood upon the shore of the Baltic, and utilised the half-hour before his steamer started for Copenhagen by hunting for shells. As a reward, he found a well-known freshwater genus (Paludina) among common marine forms.[71]