Some persons believe, against all probability of evidence, that spoken language was a sudden original inspiration instead of a gradual invention. None, however, assert the right of believing the same thing in regard to letters or written language. The progressive origin of alphabetical signs is admitted on all sides, so that there must have been a time when man had to trust to his fallible memory instead of written memoranda. The growth of picture-writing itself must have been extremely slow, from the difficulty of establishing an agreement as to the meaning of particular representations. What this difficulty amounts to may to some extent be tested any day in a picture-gallery, where all the appliances and skill of modern art are at our service. Without the aid of a descriptive catalogue, it is but seldom that any two accounts of the meaning of the same picture would be found to agree. The art of drawing, it may well be supposed, was not an inspiration. It had to be invented. The very idea of transmitting a record to future ages would only occur with the advance of civilization. The crumbling surface of the rock, the decaying bark of trees, would be the first perishable and soon obliterated manuscripts. Before account could be taken of months and years, astronomy must have made some progress. Before the flow of centuries could be accurately noted, arithmetic must have advanced far beyond the stage at which we still find it among numerous savage nations. An Esquimaux couple, it is said, find it difficult to count their own children, even when they are no more than four or five[45].
From these considerations alone we may feel perfectly certain that numbers of ages elapsed before men acquired the means of recording the duration of time by any definite measurements. Unconsciously and without set purpose, perhaps the very earliest tribes and the most untutored have left behind them traces not only of their existence but of the date and era at which they lived; traces which we are only now beginning to decipher, and to read with faltering lips.
All around us in England, in Devonshire, in Torquay, and all over the globe, lie the memorials of human beings, of whose day and generation the oldest historical records we possess know absolutely nothing. Here and there the tale is told by a heap of shells. From such heaps we know what dishes were served at the Dane’s dinner-table, at a time when cereal crops were unknown in Denmark, and sea-weed was used instead of salt[46]. Oysters and cockles, mussels and periwinkles, seem to have been ad libitum; the stag, the roe-deer, and the wild boar were at the service of that ancient Dane as often as he could catch them with his weapons of wood, stone, horn, or bone[47]; when pork and venison were scarce, his palate could content itself with dog or fox. From the waters of the mountain-lake, from the centre of the high-piled barrow, in the circles of giant stones upon broad-stretching plain or wild moorland, from peat-moss and railway-cutting and limestone cavern, we obtain, as Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Pengelly and others have so well shown, the unwritten records of prehistoric man, of human beings unnoticed in any credible history, and preceding all well-established definite historical dates whether of sacred or profane literature. Who reared the Titanic monuments of Stonehenge and Abury we know not. We know not who constructed the extraordinary animal-mounds of Wisconsin in North America—mounds hundreds of feet long, reared a few feet above the level plains, in the figures of men and beasts and birds and reptiles. These monuments, if such they were intended to be, must have demanded prodigious industry for their construction. They imply a considerable population, and some advance in artistic skill. But why they were designed, and who designed them, are circumstances alike unknown. It is necessary to press home this argument founded upon our ignorance, and to dwell upon it with some emphasis, because numbers of persons are pleased to imagine and assert that, within two or three thousand years before the Christian era, the whole human population of the globe was as it were still in the bud, and that from a single family, not mustering a dozen members to start with, all its tribes have since then been derived, with their endless diversities of features, hair, complexion, customs, tastes, and other qualities both of mind and body. According to the old chronology we are to suppose that within this limited space of time, from under a single roof, the children went forth, spreading over all lands, not only miraculously forgetting the common ancestral language, but forgetting the arts, the traditions, the sentiments, which they had in common, retrograding in some cases into a savage ferocity or an almost imbecile simplicity, in others retaining or developing forms of an advanced civilization. Esquimaux and Hottentots, Japanese and Red Indians, the Negro and the Greek, are thus united in ties of cousinship by no means remote. Arts, monuments, and modes of life essentially different in spirit and character are supposed, within these narrow bounds of time, to have sprung up; nor only to have sprung up, but to have passed away, leaving only a few faint vestiges to recall the artists, the heroes, the lawgivers, the national temper, the genius of the time, whereunto they owed their existence. It must surely be allowed that marriage customs change with slow reluctance; an alteration of the sentiment with which women are regarded is not easily or quickly produced. Yet on no subject are the practices and opinions of mankind more widely diversified. One wife to one husband is in some places the rule; but in others, one husband to many wives, one wife to many husbands, or husbands and wives without any special appropriation, which some societies consider a selfish infringement of the general right. According to the customs of different nations, wives must be fought for, or stolen, or purchased, or caught in a race, or wooed and won with pin-money and other endearments. According to the feeling of different races, the wife is a chattel, a beast of burden, a slave, a stewardess, a domestic ornament, an equal, or a master[48]. Let it be granted that many of these customs and sentiments may have been contemporaneous in their growth or development, the same thing cannot be admitted of the different centres of colonization in which they grew and developed. Men do not without cause quit their ancestral homes to found colonies in remote parts of the world; and the causes only arise at intervals. When the cause has arisen, and the new settlement been occupied, the exiles retain for the most part, and long retain in affectionate remembrance the manners and customs, the religion and laws, of the mother-country; or when the remembrance is other than affectionate, they retain them from the want of an alternative, from the conservatism in which all men to a greater or less degree participate, from the incapacity of the human mind to strike out new customs, or revolutionize ideas, except by a gradual and half-unconscious progression.
Among the visible and tangible proofs of man’s and the earth’s antiquity, few are more interesting than those presented in the section, well known to geologists, cut by the railway through the delta of the Tinière, a torrent flowing into the Lake of Geneva[49]. Three layers of vegetable soil appear in the section, at depths of four and ten and nineteen feet respectively below the present surface. These layers contained distinctive relics. In the first were found ‘Roman tiles and a coin,’ in the second ‘fragments of unvarnished pottery, and a pair of tweezers in bronze;’ in the third, ‘fragments of rude pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, and a human skeleton having a small, round, and very thick skull.’ The thick-headed owner of that skull is computed to have lived, at the lowest estimate, about five thousand years ago. But the cone of the delta began to be formed long before the man was buried in it, and higher up the stream another cone is found about twelve times as large, requiring therefore a time for its formation about twelve times as long, unless we have recourse to that miserable refuge for the destitute in argument, which consists in supposing that causes now slow and comparatively regular, operated in former times with an incomparably greater speed and a more spasmodic violence, of which no trace remains, nor likelihood appears in the record. In a word, we may infer that, so far from the shapely order and decorous arrangement of the earth’s surface being only six thousand years old, it has taken no less than fifty or a hundred thousand years to pile up this one little heap of mud and gravel. The age of human works buried under the fertilizing sediment of the stately Nile is much disputed, but there can be little doubt, if we take into consideration the ancient fluviatile deposits in terraces sometimes hundreds of feet above the present alluvial plain, that the long-unknown sources of the mysterious river have produced ten myriad repetitions of the annual overflow, pouring down its waters to the sea through a thousand centuries.[50]
But Egypt and Switzerland are a long way off; geologizing in a railway-cutting has been before now a fatal employment; and digging pits forty feet deep into the mud of the Nile is an operation attended with difficulties peculiar to itself. Here, however, in Torquay, close at hand, we possess a register of time as compact, as accessible, as genuine, as the Library of the British Museum. Limestone, it is well known, is formed beneath the waters of the sea. When it appears above the sea-level, it must have been upheaved from its ocean-bed. How long a period must be allowed for the hill which contains Kent’s cavern to have been formed by this double process, may be left for the present to the imagination. How long a time elapsed before the cavern was burst open or eaten out from the solid limestone, we will not enquire. Thanks to the diligent exploration of it; thanks to the unwearied courtesy of its scientific curators[51], the contents of the cavern, or at least a portion of them, are now well known. Not only do they embrace the remains of animals not now existing in England, but they embrace the remains of animals long since lost to the globe. With these are mingled the products of human intelligence, the weapons of the savage. The cave-earth which, as well as the stalagmite, contains these relics of a most remote antiquity, is itself permeated with films of stalagmite, a conclusive proof of its gradual introduction. Over the lower portions have been formed in succession three solid stalagmitic floors, remnants of which have quite lately been discovered still imbedded in the cavern[52]. Let us for a moment consider what this implies. If we transport ourselves to Matlock Bath in Derbyshire, for the small fee of a penny, any one of its ‘petrifying wells’[53] will be open to our inspection. In these curious grottoes whatever object you please, natural or artificial, be it skull or the cap that once covered it, be it basket or bird, or shell or leaf, may be encrusted with a coating of stalagmite. The inexperienced visitor would like to place an object in the well, and to wait while the ‘petrifying’ waters do their work. He is surprised to find that in that case he must wait and watch for months and years, while the slow persevering stream falls upon his treasure with its ceaseless drip, drip, drip, and that the work so slowly accomplished would not be accomplished at all if the flowing of the stream were hastened. Imagine, then, in this famous cavern of ours what an interminable song, though an intermittent one, must have been sung with this drip, drip, drip, through ages and ages, to produce, as in one place it has done, a solid stalagmitic mass full twelve feet in thickness. Now, according to Usher’s chronology, we have seventeen centuries from Adam to the Flood, and twenty-three centuries from the Flood to the age of Julius Cæsar. If this chronology is to be accepted, Kent’s cavern must have been filled either in the first period or in the second. As the same arguments will apply to each, let us assume that the second or longer period sufficed for this purpose, and see what further admissions this assumption will involve. We have three and twenty centuries at our disposal. At the end of that time we know historically that Britain was occupied by tribes more or less savage, some of them going about almost naked, destitute of almost all the arts of civilization. We are to imagine the ancestors of this wild race migrating from Asia and slowly pioneering their way to the western limits of Europe. Necessity is the mother of invention; but these men in their difficult adventurous travel through unknown seas and pathless jungles tenanted by dangerous beasts, learn only how to forget. They forget the use of brass and iron, and take to weapons and tools of flint; they give up tillage; they give up building strong towers, and shelter themselves in wooden huts or caves and dens of the earth. The climate of Western Asia is warm and sunny, that of England often, and in many parts, bleak and foggy and cold; therefore these intelligent children of Noah, in order perhaps to harden themselves in the process of acclimatization, as they force their way into the fog and mist, instead of keeping or assuming the flowing robes of the Asiatic, exchange their garments, at any rate in battle, for a wash of paint. How interesting it would be to have the family portraits of a Highland clan from the earliest times, showing how they gradually made it fashionable to do without the various articles of clothing which one by one they have been induced to resume[54]! During the same epoch, within the same limits of time, migrating also from the warm regions of Asia, came elephants and lions, hyenas and bears, the rhinoceros and the elk. Little recked they then of change of climate, which now they so ill endure. They prowled all over Europe; they swam across the English Channel. Yet before the historical period begins in Gaul and Britain, most of these species had had time not only to make their way thither, not only to nourish and abound in these habitations, but to die out and to be forgotten. We know for certain that elephants once roamed over Devon. Did they succumb to the flint weapons of the savage? Was the same savage able to extirpate the hyena and the lion, though the representatives of those fierce beasts still partially set us at defiance in India, notwithstanding the rifles and gunpowder of modern civilization? Let us imagine that within the specified time all that has been mentioned could have happened, and that some of the animals, such as the woolly rhinoceros, had time to assume the characters of northern species, or that the climate had time for vast changes and alterations, or that the winds perhaps in those days blew hot and cold with the same breath so as to suit arctic and tropical species indifferently;—we must imagine further that within the same limits the three floors of stalagmite could have been formed in succession, and two of them successively broken up. They must have been formed, not during the whole of the period, but only during that part of it which followed the introduction into Britain of wild beasts, and of men who used flint weapons; for one unmistakeable weapon of human manufacture, and innumerable bones of the great old cave bear have been found within the rock-like breccia of stone and stalagmite and cave-earth, some feet below both the floors of more recent formation[55]. The longer the period, therefore, we allow for the migration from the East and the dying out of civilized life, the shorter is the period left for the stalagmitic formation. Yet probably the whole twenty-three centuries would not suffice for the formation of one of the floors; how much less could a fraction of the period suffice to form all three, and to supply the intervals during which, through some change of circumstances, the cave-earth was accumulating, and consequently no solid floor being formed.
At Matlock the drip is continuous, being supplied by a stream, and not being, as in Kent’s cavern, dependent on the chances of the rainfall and the quantity of water that may percolate through a limestone roof. At Matlock, for purposes of trade, it is an object that a coating of stalagmite should be formed as quickly as possible. With this view the water is allowed to fall at the rate of fifty or sixty drops a minute, the drip being maintained at numerous points simultaneously. At Matlock we may roughly estimate that an inch of stalagmite would require four years for its formation, so that twelve feet and a half would require six hundred years. In Kent’s cavern, on the other hand, the drip is often interrupted. There is no commercial interest at hand to regulate the speed in the most advantageous manner, so that it falls sometimes too quickly and sometimes too slowly. The points at which it falls are few and far between. It cannot reasonably be supposed in any year to produce even a twentieth of the effect we have estimated for the drip at Matlock. In other words, the two later floors of the cavern would alone require a period of twelve thousand years for their formation. Even at this rate the cavern would probably have been so extremely damp and uncomfortable that no men or beasts would have chosen it for a shelter in rainy weather.
But the cavern inscriptions make it as certain as can be that the rate of speed here allowed for the formation of stalagmite is vastly too high, and therefore that the time allowed for the formation is vastly too low. The famous inscription of 1688 was shown to me a few days back[56]. It was at that very time wet with the drip from the cavern roof, a drip falling at the rate of thirty-four drops a minute. If the date were really cut in the year 1688 (and there is no reason to suppose that it was not), by our first calculation more than two inches of stalagmite ought to have formed over it. Instead of which there is but a thin veneer, a veneer that was observed upon it more than forty years ago, and which has not in all those forty years increased enough to make such a description of it inappropriate. If the date 1615 be authentic, over which, in the opinion of the superintendents of the exploration, not one-eighth of an inch of stalagmite has been formed in more than two centuries and a-half, at the same rate of progression twelve feet and a-half of stalagmite would demand for its formation three hundred thousand years.
This cavern by itself, therefore—this one little crack in the outermost rind of the earth’s surface—proves a comparatively immense antiquity for the existence of organic life and of human beings upon the globe. But to compare the antiquity of the cavern contents with the antiquity of the limestone formation in which they are contained is positively beyond any intelligible numerical measurement. Yet the limestone formation itself is filled with the relics of living creatures, and in some parts, if not in all, is one gigantic mass of such remains.
In cliffs of sea-shore and river, in railway-cuttings, in mine-shafts and quarries, we may often see layers of the earth’s crust in the order of their original deposition. Except where the signs are present of some subsequent violent interference, this order is uniform and invariable. It is not that all the members of the series are invariably present, far from it; but in order of deposition the relations of higher and lower are never interchanged. Every one of the many different layers which have been distinguished by geologists has a distinctive group of fossils. You may, if you please, suppose that for each of these layers of the earth’s crust there was a new creation of living creatures, wonderfully like at each successive step, though wonderfully different at long intervals, as though they were the work of an artist whose ideas moved but slowly; but for such a supposition you have no authority; the conception has neither simplicity nor grandeur; it does not even accord with the facts, since, amid the general change of organic structures, we find the permanence of a few; and while the groups of two successive layers have, each of them, numerous distinctive forms, it is impossible to draw any definite boundary-line between the groups themselves, which sometimes intermingle with an inextricable interlacing on their confines. Nothing comes out more clearly to the student of the rocks, than that the world of to-day is the world of millions of years back; from one point of view ever-changing, yet ever essentially the same; from another point of view, out of the utmost regularity of alternation, never producing the same thing, or presenting the same aspect twice. We think that the stage has been essentially altered, because in the days of that immeasurable past we did not strut upon it. We are unable to fathom the depth of our own insignificance, and are unwilling to believe in a march of time, compared with which the span of our own lives seems so contemptible. In the depths of the ocean the formation of chalk is said to be going on at this very day. Probably there is no time known to the geologist at which the formation of chalk has not been going on in the depths of the ocean; but its older layers have been altered by chemical and mechanical forces, by fire, by pressure, and by other means.
We know that chalk and limestone do not form in the open air. If we find them piled up in enormous hills and mountains high above the level of the sea, and far from its coasts, we know that they did not grow in that position; that once their proud crests and ridges lay low in an ocean bed. They could not have been formed on a sudden, or rapidly, or by any other than the slow steps of infinitesimally small successive accumulations: for we find them filled throughout with the evidences of life, shells and sponges, and corals of exquisite beauty and delicacy, generations after generations of which must have had time to build up their beautiful fabrics. Many things may be hastened; you may quicken the growth of many; but you can’t hurry a sponge. Every foot and inch of a chalk cliff, of a limestone mountain, must have been formed originally under water with almost incredible slowness. It must have been raised up to meet the clouds of heaven since its formation in the ocean-depth. Do you think that this can have been a rapid process? Volcanic cones, it is true, are sometimes piled up by a sudden effort. But with widespread platforms of solid rock the upheaving forces deal more respectfully. An average elevation of a foot or two in a century, is perhaps a high exceptional speed for such movements. But this rate requires a thousand centuries for a hill only one or two thousand feet high, to rise, not from the depths, but from the surface of the water. If we had only a single formation to deal with instead of scores of them; if we had a thickness of only one thousand feet of the earth’s crust to consider, instead of scores of thousands, the proved antiquity of the globe would be enormous. What is to be said, then, when we stand face to face with what geologists have been pleased to call the new red sandstone? This formation cannot be less than millions of years old, although in relation to the Devonian limestone it is indisputably new. Those deep red rocks, that with their fantastic profiles in so many places fringe the southern border of Devon, must have been formed since the limestone; for the simple reason, that in every part they are full of pebbles or fragments of the limestone containing characteristic fossils of the earlier formations. It will at least be granted that you cannot break off a piece from a rock before the rock itself exists. Prior, then, to the very beginning of the formation of these red conglomerates, the limestone rock must have been formed; it must have been heaved up above the level of the sea; fragments must have been broken off from it, rolled into pebbles, triturated into sand. As the breaking, and the rolling, and the grinding went on, so with equal steps would the growth of the conglomerate proceed. But the workshop and the work must still have been beneath the waters of the ocean, and not till the whole work of formation was finished could the further process be begun of raising the work above the level of the waves.