Attempts have been made to throw doubt upon these implements, first upon their nature, and next upon their genuineness; but we think no one who weighs the evidence candidly and carefully, can award to these doubts the merit of respectability. That they are works of art and not native forms, is, we think, as fully established as human observation can establish anything; and though frauds have been recently detected, it would be no more absurd to attribute the whole phenomena of fossil remains to fraudulent manufacture, than to refer to the same source the whole series of flint implements. In many cases the flint tools were taken out of their position by the hands of scientific men themselves, and in others the excavations were made under their immediate supervision. M. Gandry, in giving an account of his researches at St. Acheul, in 1859, to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, says: 'The great point was not to leave the workmen for a single instant.'
But the most remarkable, not to say startling revelations of the whole book, are those pertaining to the discovery of an ancient place of sepulture at Auvignac, in the south of France. Here we seem to be brought, as it were, face to face with the denizens of the departed ages, and to have them start up from their ancient tombs to tell the story of their death and sepulture. We enter this old burial place with feelings of more strange and solemn awe than we could have in threading the catacombs of Rome. An obscure village at the foot of the Pyrenees reveals in its precincts a more astounding history than all the monuments and mausoleums of the 'eternal' city.
In the year 1852, a laborer named Bonnemaison, employed in repairing roads, observed that rabbits, when hotly pursued by the sportsman, ran into a hole which they had burrowed in a talus of small fragments of limestone and earthy matter lodged in a depression on the face of a steep escarpment of nummulitic limestone which forms the bank of a small brook near the town of Auvignac. On reaching as far into the opening as the length of his arm, he drew out to his surprise one of the long bones of the human skeleton; and his curiosity being excited, and having a suspicion that the hole communicated with a subterranean cavity, he commenced digging a trench through the middle of the talus, and in a few hours found himself opposite a heavy slab of rock, placed vertically against the entrance. Having removed this, he discovered on the other side of it an arched cavity, seven or eight feet in its greatest height, ten in width, and seven in horizontal depth. It was almost filled with bones, among which were two entire skulls, which he recognized at once as human. The people of Auvignac flocked in astonishment to the spot, and Dr. Amiel, the mayor, having first ascertained as a medical man and anatomist that the relics contained the bones of seventeen human skeletons of both sexes and all ages, ordered them all to be reinterred in the parish cemetery.
In 1860, M. Lartet, a distinguished French savan, examined thoroughly the remaining contents of the cavern and its surroundings and approaches. He found, on removing the talus which filled up the depression on the face of the rock, a level terrace leading to the mouth of the cave. On this terrace was a layer of charcoal and ashes, eight inches thick, containing fragments of broken, burnt, and gnawed bones of extinct and recent mammalia, in all some nineteen species, and some seventy or eighty individuals. Also in the same deposit were hearthstones, and works of art, flint knives, projectiles, sling-stones, and chips. Many of the bones of the extinct herbivora were streaked, as if the flesh had been scraped off them by a flint instrument, and others were split open, as if for the purpose of extracting the marrow. Inside the grotto were two or three feet of made earth mixed with human and a few animal bones of extinct and recent species. None of them, however, burnt or gnawed; and numerous small flat plates of a white shelly substance made of some species of cockle, perforated in the middle as if for the purpose of being strung into a bracelet; also some mementos and memorials of the chase and the sepulture. Did no opposing traditions stand in the way, we are quite sure the evidence elicited from this examination would at once fix its character as a burial place, of an antiquity coeval with the existence of the great extinct mammalia of the post-pliocene period. It, however, contains some features of special interest. In the words of Sir Charles Lyell:
'The Auvignac cave adds no new species to the list of extinct quadrupeds, which we have elsewhere, and by independent evidence, ascertained to have once flourished contemporaneously with man. But if the fossil memorials have been correctly interpreted—if we have here before us at the northern base of the Pyrenees a sepulchral vault with skeletons of human beings, consigned by friends and relatives to their last resting place—if we have also at the portal of the tomb the relics of funeral feasts, and within it indications of viands destined for the use of the departed on their way to the land of spirits; while among the funeral gifts are weapons wherewith in other fields to chase the gigantic deer, the cave lion, the cave bear, and woolly rhinoceros—we have at last succeeded in tracing back the sacred rites of burial, and, more interesting still, a belief in a future state, to times long anterior to those of history and tradition. Rude and superstitious as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved, by cherishing the hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of 'noble,' which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as the primitive condition of our race:
'As Nature first made man,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'
The remainder of the book, so far as it relates to the evidences of man's antiquity, is mainly occupied with the consideration of the glacial period, in its relation to the indications of man's first appearance in Europe. It bears evidence throughout of the hand of a master. The gigantic phenomena and wonderful agencies of that marvellous period in geological history—its vast icefields and glaciers, with their movements, drifts, and denudations—its coast ice and glacial lakes and rivers—the risings and sinkings of level of islands and continents, are all considered and discussed in a thoroughly intelligent and scholarly manner. And here, also, amid the debris of this far-distant and inhospitable era, has man left the traces of his existence, as indubitably, according to Sir Charles Lyell, as the great icebergs themselves. Not only is it proven that man coexisted with the extinct animals, but also that he coexisted with the extinct glaciers. We have not space, however, to follow out in detail this evidence.
The last five chapters of the book are devoted to the discussion of certain subjects of vital interest and great moment just now in the scientific world—the theories of progression, development, transmutation, and variation of species. It seems, however, to be the intention of the author to give us, not so much his own views as a general résumé or outline of the tendencies and conclusions of the scientific world upon these subjects. This he does with his usual fulness, candor, and impartiality; and the reader at the same time gathers from him that he is strongly inclined to accept the doctrine of the origin of species by 'variation and natural selection,' and to accord vast periods of time for the workings of that law of development and transmutation which he believes to pervade all mundane affairs. Considerable space is devoted to the consideration of man's place in nature, and especially to the discussions arising out of the comparison of the human and simian brain; and while the author fully admits the vast gulf placed between man and the animal creation below him—a gulf which science cannot bridge—by virtue of the moral and religious nature of man, yet he pointedly protests against confounding distinct orders of ideas, and insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or 'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that 'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive periods of life—sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia, bordering on reason—and lastly the improvable reason of man himself, presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter.'
To our mind one thing is certain. The whole scientific world is drifting slowly, but steadily and surely, to the verification and acceptance—with certain and in some cases important modifications—of the development hypothesis of Maillet, Lamarck, La Place, Owen, and the author of the 'Vestiges[4] of Creation.' The movement reminds one of the motion of one of the great Greenland glaciers, so slow, quiet, almost imperceptible, yet inexorable as fate—heedless of all obstacles. As in the case of all great, genuine revolutionary or formative ideas, it is curious to watch the incidents of its career—to note the alarm, indignation, scorn, and holy horror occasioned by its first announcement—to observe these subsiding gradually into patient endurance and permissive sufferance, and these again giving place to a certain curiosity and wakeful interest, culminating at last in downright advocacy and championship.
We are inclined to think that great injustice has been done the development theory in the name of morals and religion. There has been no end to the railing against it on the part of clergymen, Biblical interpreters, theological Professors, and orthodox editors. It was held to put infinite dishonor upon the Creator, not only to suppose that He should take many millions of years to make a world, but that He should employ the same lengthened period to make man, instead of speaking him into existence by a word. It was held to put infinite dishonor upon the Scriptures to suppose that they should be understood in any but the most literal sense. And it was held to put infinite dishonor upon man to suppose that he was kith and kin with the monkey—bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of the unreasoning quadrupeds, over which in his god-like royalty he was to sway his imperial sceptre—and this, too, by a class of teachers who could never have enough of thundering in the ears of men their degradation, their lost, debased, insensate, and damnable condition, worse than that of beasts or devils.