1892-93.] NOTES ox the western denes. 41 



false theories have been built, I feel the necessity as a Christian and an 

 observer of my own surroundings to put on record my utter disbelief in 

 any proposition which may run counter to the natural deductions from 

 the Book of Genesis. True, even Christian anthropologists are far from 

 agreed as to the probable age of man, since such a learned orientalist as 

 the Abbe Vigouroux suggests* and Father Thein inclines to believe + 

 that creation dates from over 8000 years as against the 6000 which it 

 was customary to reckon as the maximum distance which separates us 

 from Adam. Yet methinks that there are limits beyond which modern 

 interpretation of the sacred text cannot safely go. I suppose that no 

 person who has any regard for the authority of the Bible — I am tempted 

 to add, and for sober, common sense :|: — will believe in the hundreds of 

 thousands of years attributed by some to palaeolithic stone implements 

 and consequently to man. To show that there are valid reasons to 

 doubt the correctness of such chronological computations, let me adduce 

 here a few facts derived from the very source to which they are wont to 

 point in confirmation of their extravagant theories, I mean Geology. 



The great antiquity attributed in Europe to stone implements is based 

 generally on the age of the geological strata wherein they are found. 

 For the sake of briefness, let us choose those the formation of which is 

 the most easily accounted for, say the alluvial strata. Pieces of pottery 

 found at a depth of thirty-nine feet in the mud of the Nile delta were 

 pronounced by antiquarians of repute to be 13,000 years old. Such 

 authorities as Sir John Lubbock and Sir Charles Lyell asserted in various 

 papers that those Egyptian relics must date back from 12,000 to 60,000 

 years. Now, Sir R.. Stephenson found at a greater depth in the delta, 

 near Damietta, a brick bearing on its surface the stamp of Mohammed 

 Ali I \ The discoverer of the pieces of pottery " rated the growth of the 

 mud deposit in a given spot at only three and a half inches in a century ; 



* Les Livres Saints, etc., Vol. III., p. 238. 



+ Christian Antliropology, p. 245, New York, 1S92. 



:J; For my own justification and to illustrate the vagaries of some modern scientists, let me 

 recall the fact that from the supposed vestiges of man discovered in the strata of the tertiary 

 period, some geologists assign a date of at least 300,000 years before the beginning of the historic 

 epoch. Now a clever Italian writer who has made an arithmetical compulation of tiie number of 

 . men who must have been existing on the earth at the time commonly assigned to the creation of 

 Adam according to that hypothesis, finds that this number cannot be expressed without 434 

 figures ! Suppose the habitable part of the earth extended in a series of stories each one meter 

 in height and filled with men in the ratio of lO to each square meter as far up as 400 times the 

 radius of the moon's orbit and the limits of the earth's orbit will be reached and yet the number 

 of these men will be represented only by the figure 2 followed by 26 ciphers. 



§ Christian Anthropology, p. 267, New York, 1892. 



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