5 86 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ward from bronze to stone ; that it was progress rather than 

 decline. 



These investigations were supplemented by similar researches 

 elsewhere. In many other parts of the world it was found that 

 lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization, but 

 all within a certain range, intermediate between the cave-dwellers 

 and the historic period. To explain this epoch of the lake-dwell- 

 ers history came in with the account given by Herodotus of the 

 lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave protection from the 

 armies of Persia. Still more important, Comparative Ethnography 

 showed that to-day, in various parts of the world, especially in 

 New Guinea and West Africa, races of men are living in lake- 

 dwellings built upon piles, and with a range of implements and 

 weapons strikingly like many of those discovered in these ancient 

 lake deposits of Switzerland. 



In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, 

 and other countries, remains of a different sort were also found, 

 throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds, 

 and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker 

 tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward 

 tendency. 



At a very early period in the history of these discoveries, vari- 

 ous attempts were made, in the supposed interest of Scripture, to 

 break the force of such evidences of the progress and develop- 

 ment of the human race from lower to higher. Out of all the 

 earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they exhibit 

 the opposition as developed under two different schools of theol- 

 ogy, each working in its own way. The first of these shows great 

 ingenuity and learning, and is presented by Mr. Southall, in his 

 book, published in 1875, entitled The Recent Origin of the World. 

 In this he grapples first of all with the difficulties presented by 

 the early date of Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his 

 argument is the statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a 

 period before modern archaeological discoveries were well under- 

 stood, that " Egypt laughs the idea of a rude stone age, a polished 

 stone age, a bronze age, an iron age, to scorn." 



Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late excel- 

 lent Mr. Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of these 

 chapters may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of 

 Genesis, to insist that the only safety was in believing that, six 

 thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some inscrutable purpose, 

 in a moment, set Niagara pouring very near the spot where it is 

 pouring now ; laid the various strata, and sprinkled the fossils 

 through them like plums through a pudding ; scratched the glacial 

 grooves upon the rocks, and did the vast multitude of things, little 

 and great, in all parts of the world, required to delude geologists 



