NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 5 8i 



the minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement 

 in onr sacred books that " death entered the world by sin " v. 

 taken as a historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, bofc.ro 

 the serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on 

 our planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology reveal. <1 in 

 the strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a 

 vast multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their fellow- 

 creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized skeletons of 

 many of these the partially digested remains of animals, this doc- 

 trine was too heavy to be carried, and it was quietly dropped. 



But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine 

 of the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his " fall " re- 

 ceived a great accession of strength from a source most unex- 

 pected. As we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the groat 

 antiquity of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable 

 idea regarding him. "We saw, it is true, that the opponents of 

 Boucher de Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of 

 human implements in the drift, were successful in securing a ver- 

 dict of " not proven " as regarded his discovery of human bones ; 

 but their triumph was short-lived. Many previous discover i- 

 little thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others 

 were added which resulted, not merely in confirming the truth re- 

 garding the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine 

 which the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater dis- 

 like — the doctrine that man has not fallen from an original high 

 estate in which he was created about six thousand years ago ; but 

 that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the 

 sacred chronologists, he has been — in spite of lapses and deteri- 

 orations here and there — rising. 



A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As 

 early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity 

 Quaternary remains, dug up long before at Cannstadt, near Stutt- 

 gart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low type. A 

 battle raged about it for a time, but this finally subsided, owing to 

 uncertainties arising from the circumstances of the discovery. 



In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quater- 

 nary remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was 

 found bearing the same evidence of a low human type. As in the 

 case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and 

 finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in sus- 

 pense. But new discoveries were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux, 

 at Spy, and elsewhere human skulls were found of a similarly low 

 type ; and while each of the earlier discoveries was open to debate, 

 and either, had no other been discovered, might have been con- 

 siderd an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these showed 

 conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at that remote 



