[1624] Cf. also his “Early Condition of Man,” in British Ass. Proc., 1867; and Lyell’s Principles of Geology, 11th ed., ii. 485; Dawkins in No. Amer. Rev., Oct., 1883, p. 348.
[1625] Darwin took Lubbock’s side, Descent of Man, i. 174. Bradford, in his American Antiquities, held the barbarous American to be a degraded remnant of a society originally more cultivated; and a similar view was held by S. F. Jarvis in his Discourse before the New York Hist. Soc. (Proc., iii., N. Y., 1821). Cf. Büchner’s Man, Eng. transl., 67, 276. Rawlinson (Antiquity of man historically considered) considers savagery a “corruption and degradation,—the result of adverse circumstances during a long period.”
[1626] N. Y., 1869; originally in Good Words, Mar.-June, 1868.
[1627] Dawson’s Fossil Men and their modern representatives (London, 1880, 1883) is “an attempt to illustrate the characters and conditions of prehistoric men in Europe by those of the American races.” A conservative reliance on the biblical record, as long understood, characterizes Dawson’s usual speculations. Cf. his Nature and the Bible, his Story of the Earth, his Origin of the World, and his Address as president of the geological section of the Amer. Association in 1876. He confronts his opponents’ views of the long periods necessary to effect geographical changes by telling them that in historic times “the Hyrcanian ocean has dried up and Atlantis has gone down.”
[1628] Dawson (Fossil Men, 218) says: “I think that American archæologists and geologists must refuse to accept the distinction of a palæolithic from a neolithic period until further evidence can be obtained.”
[1629] These are very nearly the views of Winchell in his Preadamites, p. 420.
[1630] Cf. his papers in Methodist Quarterly, xxxvi. 581; xxxvii. 29.
[1631] This is also considered important evidence by Dawson, as well as Winchell’s estimate, in his 5th Report, Minnesota Geol. Survey (1876), of the 8,000 or 9,000 years necessary for the falls of St. Anthony to have worked back from Fort Snelling. Edw. Fontaine’s How the World was peopled (N. Y., 1872) is another expression of this recent-origin belief.
[1632] This cataclysmic element of force, as opposed to the gradual uniformity theory of Lyell, finds expounders in Huxley and Prestwich, and is the burden of H. H. Howorth’s Mammoth and the Flood (London, 1887) in its palæontological and archæological aspects, its geological aspects having been touched by him so far only in some papers in the Geological Mag. This great overthrow of the gigantic animals, during which the man intermediate between the palæolithic and neolithic age lived, was not universal, so that the less unwieldy species largely saved themselves; and it was in effect the scriptural flood, of which traditions were widely preserved among the North American tribes (Mammoth and the Flood, 307, 444).
[1633] Southall answered his detractors in the Methodist Quarterly, xxxvii. 225. Geo. Rawlinson (Antiq. of Man historically considered, Present Day Tract, No. 9, or Journal of Christian Philosophy, April, 1883) speaks of the antiquity of prehistoric man as involving considerations “to a large extent speculative” as to limits, “that are to be measured not so much by centuries as by millenia.” He condenses the arguments for a recent origin of man.