Inquirer.
Answer.—He is first cousin to Queen Victoria; being the son of Adolphus Frederick, Duke of Cambridge, tenth child of George III., of whom Edward Augustus, Duke of Kent, the Queen’s father, was fifth child. He succeeded to the title of his father, July 8, 1850. In 1837 he was promoted to a colonelcy in the British army. In 1854 he was Lieutenant General commanding the first division sent to aid Turkey against Russia in what is known as the Crimean war. He led the troops at Alma and Inkerman. There was a good deal of dissatisfaction expressed at the slow progress of the war, and under the plea of ill-health he returned to England, where, in 1856, he succeeded Viscount Hardinge as Commander-in-chief. In 1862 he was raised to the rank of Field Marshal. He has never married, but—like his Uncle William IV., who lived for many years with Mrs. Jordan, the actress, rearing a numerous illegitimate family by her, and his Uncle Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex, who, in violation of the royal marriage act, married a subject, the Lady Augusta Murray, who bore him two illegitimate children—he has persistently lived for many years with Miss Fairbrother, once known as a beautiful actress, by whom he has several illegitimate children, well provided for out of his large income.
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.
Brushy Prairie, Md.
Please give a synopsis of the observations and opinions of the best geologists of the present time as to the antiquity of man upon the earth.
R. Ashley.
Answer.—To summarize the earliest recorded geological evidences of man’s life as briefly as possible it may be said: 1. In the words of Professor Archibald Geikie, of Edinburgh University, “The geological deposits which contain the history of the human period are cavern loam, river alluvia, lake bottoms, peat mosses, and other superficial accumulations.” Human remains are not found imbedded in stratified rock, as in the cases of the fossilized plants and animals of the lower orders. The entire period in which any supposed evidences of the existence of man have been discovered is the Miocene or middle epoch of the Tertiary period. They consist of a few flint flakes, fancied to have been used, possibly, as human implements, but so roughly shaped that it is admitted they may be simply natural; and some bones of animals, scratched as if scraped by men, but more probably by the teeth of wild animals. No geologist of high repute acknowledges any of these crude objects and marks as proof of the existence of man in the Miocene period. It has been claimed that traces of man were found in California, in Calaveras County, and on Table Mountain, in the next later formation, the Pliocene. But M. Favre, reviewing the whole subject up to 1870, and Mr. Evans, President of the Geological Society of London, still later, in 1875, declare that the existence of man in any epoch of the Tertiary period is unproved. 2. The next period is the Quaternary, which immediately precedes the geological epoch in which we are living, known as the “recent epoch.” The Quaternary period is subdivided into three epochs, of which the earliest was the “glacial,” the second the “champlain,” and the third the “terrace.” During the first of these the northern regions of Europe, Asia, and America appear to have been capped with ice down to about the latitude of 40 degrees north. During the second the glaciers melted, the ice cap receded toward the pole, and the greater part of the now cultivable regions of the northern hemisphere were flooded with seas and lakes, underneath which heavy sedimentary deposits were found. During the third epoch land continued to rise; the lakes were drained off; mighty rivers took the place of many of the lakes, cutting deep channels through the old flood plain-deposits left by glaciers and lakes, and leaving terraces or bluffs, such as are seen along the Mississippi, Missouri, and other great rivers. In this formation, in the terraces of the river Somme, near Abbeville, M. Boucher de Perthes discovered, about 1858, chipped flints, associated with the bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, hyena, horse, etc., which are generally regarded as human implements. Similar discoveries were made at Hoxne, England, in strata underlying the higher level river-gravels, but overlying the glacier deposit, which seems to fix this discovery in the champlain epoch. A well-shaped human skull was found in a cave at Engis, near Liege, Belgium, associated with bones of extinct and living species, beneath a crust of stalagmite, which are believed to belong to the middle or latter part of the Quaternary period. Near Nice, in a cave at Mentone, a few years ago, was found the skeleton of a man, associated with the bones of the cave-bear and the cave-lion—long extinct in that region—and the bones of living species, such as the reindeer and stag, with twenty-two perforated teeth of the stag lying around his head as if they had been worn as a necklace. In what is called the Aurignac cave in France were found seventeen human skeletons of both sexes and all sizes, along with entire bones of extinct animals, and human implements and ornaments. The cave was closed up with a slab, and outside of it was a deposit of ashes and cinders, with burnt and split and knawed bones of extinct animals, covered with talus, or a sloping heap of broken rock and earth. Coming down from these discoveries to those of apparently later times, the habitations of more civilized men have been discovered in what are called the “lake dwellings” of Switzerland, of New Guinea, South America, and in some parts of Africa. Such are the chief indications of the antiquity of man, reckoned by geological periods and epochs; but how to reduce these latter to years is still an unsolved problem; so much so that some geologists claim that the beginning of the terrace epoch, which, as above shown, contains the earliest well-defined human remains, does not extend back more than 7,000 to 10,000 years, while others date it back from 50,000 to 60,000 years. Professor Le Conte sums up his review of this question by saying: “In conclusion, we may say that we have as yet no certain knowledge of man’s time on the earth. It may be 100,000 years, or it may be only 10,000, but more probably the former than the latter.” The fact that the deposits in which human remains and implements have been discovered are all confessedly “superficial” gives opportunity for unending disputations as to the origin of such remains, the date of their deposit, and the time requisite to produce subsequent physical changes.
PALACE OF THE CÆSARS.