[130] In the famous eruption of A.D. 79.
[131] A volcano of Japan.
[132] These results are worked into the tenth edition of the "Principles" (chaps. xxv. and xxvi.). See also a paper on Stony Lava on Steep Slopes of Etna (Proc. Roy. Soc. 1858, ix. p. 248). He received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society in November.
CHAPTER X.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
Though many men on reaching their sixty-third year are content to rest upon their oars and not to attempt new ventures, Lyell had plunged into a question which was arousing almost as much excitement as the origin of species—namely, the antiquity of man. It was a question, indeed, which for a long time must have been before his mind—witness his remarks on Dr. Schmerling's work in the caves near Liége; but it had assumed a special significance owing to the famous discovery of flint implements in the valley of the Somme.[133] The whole subject also would have a special interest for Lyell, because he had made Tertiary deposits his special field in stratigraphy, and had worked at this subject downwards, comparing extinct with living forms, so that he had seen more than others of the borderland which blends by an insensible transition the province of the geologist with that of the archæologist. Probably also the thought which he had been giving to the question of the origin of species would bring into no less vivid prominence that of the age and origin of the human race. Be this as it may, he undertook a task comparatively novel, and for the next three years was fully occupied in the preparation of his third great book, "The Antiquity of Man." Travel was necessary for this purpose also; but as the journeys were less lengthy than those already described, and led him for the most part over old ground, it is needless to enter into details. He visited the gravels of the Somme Valley and the caves on the Meuse, besides other parts of Northern France and Belgium,[134] the gravel pits near Bedford, and various localities in England, examining into the evidence for himself, and paying particular attention, not only to the question of man's antiquity, but also to the supposed return of a warmer climate than now prevails after the era of glacial cold. The book was published early in 1863. Naturally its conclusions were startling to many and were vigourously denounced by some; but it was a great success, for it ran through three editions in the course of the year. A fourth and enlarged edition was published in 1873.
The book may seem, from the literary critic's point of view, rather composite in character, and this objection was made in a good-natured form by a writer in the Saturday Review,[135] who called it "a trilogy on the antiquity of man, ice, and Darwin." That, however, is but a slight blemish, if blemish it be, and it was readily pardoned, because of the general interest of the book, the clearness of its style, and the lucidity of its reasoning.
In accordance with his usual plan of work—proceeding tentatively from the known to the unknown—Lyell begins with times nearest to the present era and facts of which the interpretation is least open to dispute. He conducts his reader at the outset to the peat mosses of Denmark, where weapons of iron, bronze, and stone lie in a kind of stratified order; and to those mounds of shells, the refuse heaps of a rude people, which are found on the Baltic shore. Next he places him on the site of the pile-built villages which once fringed the shores of Swiss and Italian lakes. Here weapons of iron, of bronze, and of stone are hidden in peat or scattered on the lake-bed. But these log-built settlements, such as those which Herodotus described at Lake Prasias in Roumelia, are not the only remnants of an almost prehistoric people, for nearer home we find analogous constructions in the crannoges of Ireland—islets partly artificial, built of timber and stone. Lyell then passes on from Europe to the valleys of the Nile and Mississippi, and so to the "carses" of Scotland. In the last case canoes buried in the alluvial deposits, as in the lowland by the Clyde, indicate that some physical changes, slight though they may be, have occurred since the coming of man. But none of these researches lead us back into a very remote past; they keep us still lingering, as it were, on the threshold of history. The weapons which have been described, even if made of stone, exhibit a considerable amount of mechanical skill, for many of them are fashioned and polished with much care, while they are associated with the remains of creatures which are still living at no great distance, if not in the immediate vicinity. Accordingly he conducts his reader, in the next place, to the localities where ruder weapons only have been found, fashioned by chipping, and never polished—namely, to the caves of Belgium and of Britain, of Central and of Southern France, and to the gravel beds in the valleys of the Somme and the Seine, of the Ouse and other rivers of Eastern and Southern England. These furnish abundant evidence that man was contemporary with several extinct animals, such as the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, or with others which now inhabit only arctic regions, such as the reindeer and the musksheep, and that the valleys since then have been deepened and altered in contour. This evidence, stratigraphical as well as palæontological, proves that important changes have occurred since man first appeared, not only in climate, but also in physical geography.