234 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



the well-known British ethnologist. He commences by saying, "that 

 it is my conviction that the evidence which has of late years been ad- 

 duced, giving to the presence of man on the earth an antiquity far be- 

 yond the usual estimate of it, is already satisfactorily established. 

 There can, I think, now be no question that man was a contemporary 

 of animals, such as lions, hyaanas, elephants, and rhinoceroses, extinct 

 far beyond the reach of human record. But among the evidences 

 brought forward to prove the antiquity of man, the paucity of relics of 

 his own person, compared with the abundance of those the unquestion- 

 able work of his hands, has attracted especial notice. Thus, in the 

 valley of the Somme and other places, where flint implements have 

 been found in abundance in the same drift with the bones of the ex- 

 tinct elephant and rhinoceros, not a single bone of a human skeleton 

 lias yet been discovered. The scarcity of human remains, compared 

 with those of the lower animals, may, I think, be to some extent ac- 

 counted for. In the savage state, man is ever few in number compared 

 with the wild animals ; and when he first appeared on earth, when 

 naked, unarmed, without language, and even before he had acquired 

 the art of kindling a fire, --the disparity must have been still greater. 

 Jn that condition, he would have to contend for life and food with fero- 

 cious beasts of prey, with nothing to depend upon but a superior brain 

 and the capacity of wielding a club. In such circumstances, the won- 

 der is, not that he should be few in number, but that he should have 

 been able to maintain existence at all. Sir C. Lyell adopts the theory 

 of the unity of the human race, but neither Mr. Lyell nor any one else 

 has ventured to point out the primordial stock from which the many 

 varieties which exist proceeded. The Ethiopian represented on Egyp- 

 tian paintings four thousand years old is exactly the Ethiopian of the 

 present day. The skeleton of an Egyptian mummy of the same date 

 does not differ from that of a modern Copt. A Persian colony settled 

 in Western India one thousand years ago, "and which have rigorously 

 refrained from intermixture with the black inhabitants, are not now to 

 be distinguished from the descendants of their common progenitors 

 in the parent country. For three centuries, Africans and Europeans 

 have been planted in almost every climate of the New World and its 

 islands ; and, as long as the races have been preserved pure and un- 

 mixed, there is no appreciable difference between them and the de- 

 scendants of their common forefathers. In the same manner, the hu- 

 man skeletons found in the pile buildings of the Swiss lakes, and com- 

 puted by some to be twelve thousand years old, differ in no respect 

 from those of the present inhabitants of Switzerland. If the existing 

 races of man proceeded from a single stock, either the great changes 

 which have taken place must have been effected in the locality of each 

 race, or occurred after migration. Now, distant migration was impossi- 

 ble, in the earliest period of man's existence. Man must have acquired 

 a considerable measure of civilization, that is, he must have domesti- 

 cated some animals for food and transport, have cultivated some kind 

 of corn, and have provided himself with arms of offence and defence, 

 to enable him to undertake even long land journeys, while the 

 physical geography of the world forbids the possibility of distant sea 

 \oyages, which would imply the possession of strong boats or ships, 

 with some skill in navigation, and therefore a still greater advance in 



