NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 589 



mankind in the Nile Valley was going through the same slow 

 progress from the period when, standing just above the brutes, he 

 defended himself with implements of rudely chipped stone. 



But in 1881 came discoveries which settled the question en- 

 tirely. In that year General Pitt-Rivers, a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society and President of the Anthropological Institute, and J. F. 

 Campbell, Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society of England, 

 found implements not only in alluvial deposits, associated with 

 the bones of the zebra, hyena, and other animals which have since 

 retreated farther south, but, at Djebel Assas, near Thebes, they 

 found implements of chipped flint in the hard, stratified gravel, 

 from six and a half to ten feet below the surface ; relics evidently, 

 as Mr. Campbell says, a beyond calculation older than the oldest 

 Egyptian temples and tombs." They certainly proved that Egyp- 

 tian civilization had not issued in its completeness, and all at once, 

 from the hand of the Creator in the time of Menes. Thus was 

 ended the contention of Mr. Southall. 



Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came 

 from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Ora- 

 tory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man. He had 

 been especially stirred up by the arrangement of prehistoric im- 

 plements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878 ; he bitterly 

 complains of all these as having an anti-Christian tendency, and 

 rails at science as " the idol of the day." He attacks Mortillet, one 

 of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of con- 

 tempt ; speaks of the " venom " in books on prehistoric man gen- 

 erally ; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with 

 such monstrous doctrines ; bewails the concessions made to science 

 by some eminent preachers, and foretells his own martydom at 

 the hands of men of science. 



Efforts like these accomplished little, and a more legitimate 

 attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology in 

 Egypt by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to 

 a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming and in Judea for circum- 

 cision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin. 

 But the argument against this view was triple : First, as we have 

 seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements of 

 stone similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe 

 were discovered ; secondly, these implements were discovered in 

 the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier than that of 

 Menes ; and, thirdly, the use of stone implements in Egyptian and 

 Jewish sacred functions, so far from weakening the force of the 

 arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civili- 

 zation from the men who used rude flint implements to the men 

 who built and adorned the great temples of the early dynasties, is 

 really an argument in favor of that long evolution. A study of 



