Jan. 27, 1876] 



NATURE 



245 



transport living germs, and the many important lessons 

 with which the subject is fraught. This subject has 

 akeady been so much discussed in the columns of 

 Nature, that is not necessary to enlarge upon its im- 

 portance in this review. Suffice it to say, that a know- 

 ledge of it is essential to the comprehension of the full 

 importance of having pure air within our houses. 



In conclusion, we strongly recommend the book, which, 

 while it contains all the information to be obtained, sets 

 forth nothing but what is based on sound principles, 

 advocates no hypothesis, and in no way attempts to dis- 

 guise the difficulties and impyerfect state of our knowledge 

 of the subject. Osborne Reynolds 



THE RECENT ORIGIN OF MAN 



The Recent Origin of Man, as illustrated by Geology and 



the Modern Science of Prehistoric Archaologv. By J. 



C. Southall. 8vo. Pp. 606. (Philadelphia : J. B. 



Lippincott and Co. ; London : Triibner and Co., 1875,) 



THE work published under this title is a laborious 

 compilation of heterogeneous materials derived 

 from history, archaeology, and geology, in which the 

 writer attempts to prove " that primeval man commenced 

 his career six or eight thousand years ago in a civilised 

 condition in the temperate regions of the East." In it the 

 irresponsible dicta of anonymous journalists, and the 

 records of local societies in America, Britain, and France, 

 unchecked by criticism, are taken to be of equal value 

 with those facts which have run the gauntlet of the criti- 

 cism of the civilised world, and not been found wanting. 

 A work written in this manner must necessarily be a 

 huge pile of wheat and chaff, in which the former can 

 only be got at by a process of careful winnowing. In 

 this particular case we fail to discover any wheat which 

 has not been taken out of somebody else's bam. 



Mr. Southal! tells us, in his preface, that he is the 

 champion of the Bible against the speculations of 

 " Science," and that as such he is very much hurt " that 

 many literary and scientific men should avoid mention of 

 the Hebrew Scriptures." " I do not recollect," he writes, 

 " that ' The Antiquity of Man ' even recognises that the 

 Book of Genesis is in existence ; and yet every one is 

 perfectly conscious that the author has it in mind and is 

 writing at at it all the time." This quotation illustrates 

 the spirit of the book and the one-sidedness of the 

 writer. Why should Sir Charles Lyell include Gene- 

 sis among his geological evidences as to the anti. 

 quity of man, and enter into the barren discussion which 

 has been before the world for the last half century.' 

 Mr. Southall does not recognise the fact that even if he 

 proves scientific men to be wrong he does not add to the 

 authenticity of the Scriptures, or that even if man be but 

 six or eight thousand years old, that fact again is a point of 

 small importance, except as relates to Archbishop Usher^s 

 chronology. We for our part protest against the assump- 

 tion in this work that there is any real antagonism between 

 rehgion and science, and we believe that its writer has 

 contributed perhaps the most elaborately untrustworthy 

 contribution to a dead controversy v/hich has yet been 

 made ; for in it are involved, as in a great whirlpool, facts 

 relevant and irrelevant — ever)' waif and stray, in fact, that 

 has come within' its reach. And these are carried round 



so swiftly that it is almost impossible for the reader to see 

 clearly whither the argument is tending. Of course Mr. 

 Darwin and the doctrine of evolution are drawn in, which 

 the author takes to imply " that NapKjleon Buonaparte was 

 evolved from a Corsican crab," and which we respectfully 

 decline to discuss in this connection. 



In the attempted proof of man's recent origin, Mr. 

 Southall first of all appeals to history. The records of 

 Phoenicia, Babylon, and Egypt go back some three 

 thousand years, more or less, before Christ, and civi- 

 lisation then was as complete and elaborate as it was 

 at any subsequent time. He argues that there is no 

 graduated process from the savage state in any of 

 these cases, and " that there is not a particle of evi- 

 dence that man in his earliest seats in the East was a 

 savage." He then asks (it may be jocularly), '• Did the 

 pyramids and the Chaldaean astronomy emerge from the 

 Danish Kjokkenmoddings abruptly and instantaneously?" 

 It is certainly true that we have not yet discovered any 

 proof of the gradual development of the arts and of 

 civilisation in those comparatively inaccessible regions, 

 not necessarily because they do not exist, but because the 

 exploration has been imperfect. In them there may be 

 and probably are, treasures to be revealed by the pickaxe 

 and spade quite as rich as those of Hisarlik, and showing 

 as complete a sequence. The statement that no traces of 

 a rude and imperfect civilisation have been met with in 

 the East is refuted by the discovery of enormous quanti- 

 ties of flint implements in Eg\pt and of Neolithic axes in 

 Asia Minor and in India. In the river gravels of both 

 these regions Palaeolithic hdches have been found of the 

 same type as those of Amiens and Abbeville. In the face 

 of testimony of this kind he assumes that there are no 

 traces of savagery, and accounts for the ancient civilisa- 

 tions by the supposition that they were inherited from the 

 antediluvian world through Noah and his sons, and that 

 the long-lived patriarchs were, by virtue of their experi- 

 ence, " ver>' remarkable men." We would hand over this 

 argument as it stands to Mr. Galton, for use in his next 

 edition. 



Having fixed the age of the most ancient peoples known, 

 including the Chinese, by an appeal to history, the author 

 assumes that the ancient inhabitants of Western Europe, 

 whom he admits to have been savages, were descended 

 from the same stock as the Babylonians, Egyptians, and 

 Chinese, and that the date of the former is identical with 

 that of the latter — a statement which is equivalent to the 

 saying that children of the same father are always of the 

 same age. Before we leave this part of the work behind, 

 we would remark that' Mr. Southall gravely tells us, 

 that Central America had been ^•isited by the Chinese, 

 Japanese, Irish, and Welsh before the voyage of Colum- 

 bus, as if these were well-authenticated facts. He eW- 

 dently believes in the Irish legends, and in the story of 

 Prince Madoc. 



If, however, history fares badly at the hands of Mr. 

 Southall, archaeology fares worse. He devotes one 

 chapter to the "premature announcements of Science with 

 regard to the antiquity of man," in which such state- 

 ments as the existence of a race of pigmies in Tennessee, 

 proved from the small graves, the presence of man in the 

 Pleiocene age, based on the perforated sharks' teeth in the 

 crag of Norfolk, the asserted discovery of a fossil man in 



