THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JULY, 1890. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



IX. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PEEHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. 



By ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D., 



EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



WHILE the view of chronology based npon the literal accept- 

 ance of Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches in 

 Egypt, another line of observation and thought was slowly devel- 

 oped, even more fatal to the theological view. 



From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, 

 in various parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone, 

 some rudely chipped, some polished ; in ancient times these were 

 generally considered as thunderbolts, and known as " thunder- 

 stones." This idea was carried into the middle ages, and we find 

 in the eleventh century an emperor of the East sending to the 

 Emperor Henry IV, of Germany, a " heaven axe " ; and, in the 

 twelfth century, a Bishop of Rennes asserting the value of thun- 

 der-stones as a divinely appointed means of securing success in 

 battle, safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity 

 from unpleasant dreams : even as late as the seventeenth century 

 a French ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in 

 the museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Ver- 

 dun, and claimed for it health-giving virtues. 



Yet, as early as the latter part of the sixteenth century, Michael 

 Mercati tried to prove that the " thunder-stones " were weapons or 

 implements of early races of men, though from some cause his 

 book was not published until the following century, when other 

 thinking men had begun to take up the same idea. 



But early in the eighteenth century a fact of great importance 

 was quietly established : in the year 1715 a large pointed weapon 

 of black flint was found in contact with the bones of an elephant, 



vol. xxxvii. — 22 



