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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



man's existence during, or even prior to, the 

 last glacial epoch, i. e., at the time when the ice- 

 sheet enveloped Northern Europe as far south 

 as latitude 54 ; for the glacial stage still lingers 

 in Switzerland and the Pyrenees, and continues 

 in full sway in Greenland and Labrador. We 

 find no adequate reference made to the imple- 

 ments met with in the till or bowlder drift. He 

 is content to set aside many an important issue, 

 such as this, with the assurance that ' physical 

 science has its fashions like metaphysics, that 

 theories are ever changing, aud that Darwinism 

 and prehistoric archaeology, twenty years from 

 to-day, may be both forgotten.' A great point 

 with bim, in opposition to the antiquity of man, 

 is the unity of the human race, for which, be- 

 yond denial, a strong case is to be made out, and 

 which, as it stands by itself, must be regarded 

 as the most solid and the best-welded link in 

 his whole chain of argument. But this unity, 

 resting upon the world-wide diffusion of sym- 

 bols like the pre-Christian cross, the legend of 

 the deluge, or of a terrestrial paradise, with 

 common habits of interment, and domestic 

 usage and similarity of speech even when 

 pushed to the extreme length which such argu- 

 ments attain in the hands of enthusiasts like 

 Mr. Southall is far from compelling the narrow 

 contraction of time within which he would re- 

 duce the differences entailed by the disruption 

 of that primary unity. It is true that many 

 arguments brought forward on the side of ex- 

 treme antiquity have broken down ; but what 

 are the few that our author may have disposed 

 of, beside the host of facts which the industry 

 of paleontologists and the critical study of lan- 

 guage and of race have verified and correlated? 

 The zodiacs of Dendera and Esne may be given 

 up as works of art more than 5,300 years old. 

 The fossil man of Guadaloupe may be reduced 

 to the status of a commonplace Carib not many 

 centuries back, in company with the fo9sil man 

 of Denise buried under the lava of Auvergne, 

 and the human remains found, as at first alleged, 

 under the coral limestone of Florida, but since 

 referred to the recent fresh-water sandstone for- 

 mation. The cone of the Tiniere may be brought 

 down from a date of 10,000 years to less than a 

 third of that amount ; and the notches in bones 

 from the Pliocene beds of the Val d'Arno, said 

 to bear the marks of knives, may be referred to 

 the gnawings of porcupines or of some extinct 

 rodent. But what is this more than to say that 

 because, for instance, not a few palaeolithic im- 

 plements, so called, have been proved to be 

 fictitious, therefore the countless stores which 

 crowd our museums are to be set aside as 

 worthless ? In this easy and high-handed man- 

 ner are the inferences drawn from the innumer- 

 able implements met with in the river-gravels 

 (sometimes, as our author allows, a hundred 

 feet above the present water-level) summarily 

 disposed of. These gravels he admits, whether 

 of higher or lower level, to have been deposited 

 about the close of the Glacial age, and such, 

 therefore, we may regard the date of man. 

 Within the human period then, at least, the 



valley of the Somme has been hollowed out, and 

 the Thames brought within its existing narrow 

 limits from the wider range to which its beds 

 of gravel, with bones deeply buried, bear record. 

 With the ordinary explanation of valley erosion, 

 as laid down by Sir C. Lyell, and other standard 

 writers upon geology, our author is wholly dis- 

 satisfied. Instead thereof, he brings in the por- 

 tentous hypothesis of a Palceolithic food, in- 

 duced either by an inflow of the sea, or (as more 

 in conformity with the fact of the gravels being 

 those of fresh water) a ' pluvial period ' on an 

 immense scale following the Glacial period in 

 fact, the down-pour due to the melting up of the 

 vast ice mass. 



"What were the impressions made upon the 

 dwellers by the banks of the Ouse, or the fens 

 of East Anglia, as the sea rose a hundred feet 

 higher than it is now, aggravated as it was by 

 the pluvial rainfall which ' overwhelmed the 

 habitations of the contemporaries of the mam- 

 moth,' we utterly fail to realize. Paroxysmal 

 effects, on a scale so gigantic as this, have long 

 been removed from the conception of sober ge- 

 ologists of the English school. On continents 

 later known and less thoroughly explored with- 

 in whose vast boundaries Nature seems to have 

 carried on, or still to carry on, her operations in 

 the stupendous fashion to which the cafions of 

 America and valleys like the Yosemite bear wit- 

 ness phenomena of this kind may seem con- 

 ceivable enough. And it is upon observations 

 and estimates such as those of Prof. Andrews, 

 of Chicago, based upon the aspects of Nature in 

 the great far West, that our author rests his 

 representation of the catastrophes of man's early 

 history. It is with limited, settled, old-world 

 countries like England that we for our part have 

 to do. And are we to conceive our quiet little 

 island, within the scanty ten thousand years or 

 so doled out by our author as the ' age of the 

 mammoth,' raised up some hundreds, if not 

 thousands, of feet for Mr. Southall concurs 

 with established geology as to the fact of oscil- 

 lations to this extent and swept by pluvial 

 storms till the gravel was piled up a hundred 

 feet in places ? Are we to believe that within 

 the same period the British Islands were still 

 joined by a broad tract of land to France and 

 Holland, 'the waters of the Thames and the 

 Rhine forming a common trunk, discharging it- 

 self into the North Sea, and the rivers of our 

 south coast uniting with the Seine and the 

 Somme to run westward into the Atlantic?' 

 Why, the period since the Roman invasion 

 carries us back to very nearly a fifth of this 

 range of time, and in all these years we find the 

 general level of the southern coast not disturbed 

 one inch, the apparent local changes being due 

 to erosion of the land by tide and storm, as at 

 Winchelsea and Reculver, or to heaping up of 

 shingle and sand, as at Pevenseyand Sandwich. 

 It may do in the New World to quote Humboldt 

 for ' Jorullo in Mexico being seen to rise from 

 a level plain, on September 14, 1759, to a height 

 of 1,681 feet,' as a proof that 'force, no less 

 than time, is an element in geological action.' 



