NA TURE 



245 



THURSDAY, JULY 4, 1878 



THE EPOCH OF THE MAMMOTH 



The Epoch of the Mammoth. By G. James C. Southwell, 

 A.M., LL.D. 8vo. (London : Trubner, 1878.)] 



BOOKS may be divided into three classes from the 

 point of view offered by criticism, and apart from 

 all considerations of style. There are carefully-written 

 books, the natural fruit of much thought and labour by 

 men who have special knowledge of their subject and who 

 spare no pains to avoid using faulty materials which after- 

 wards may have to be removed, as is generally the case, 

 with much trouble and annoyance. The second class 

 consists of books written without care and very generally 

 the outcome of ignorance or vanity, full of errors, and 

 worse than useless; and lastly, there are some books 

 containing much useful information, but so grouped 

 around views which are utterly wrong that they are 

 worthless for any purpose in which exact knowledge is 

 required. In this class very generally the true is so 

 mingled with the false that it requires the eye of an 

 expert to tell the one from the other. With the first and 

 second of these classes it is easy for a reviewer to deal. 

 It is his duty to welcome the first, not without pointing out 

 (if he can, and we know from experience that very fre- 

 quently he cannot) the mistakes inseparable from all 

 books, just as he is bound to rebuke sternly the second, 

 and to warn the reader that he is on dangerous ground. 

 It is, however, hard to do justice to the third ; for 

 while the information may be useful per se, in its 

 position in the book it may be mischievous because it 

 is worked into a wrong hypothesis, thus fulfilling Lord 

 Palmerston's definition of dirt as " matter in the wrong 

 place." 



The work before us falls into the third class. Its 

 author seems to have skimmed most of the current litera- 

 ture of the day. more especially reviews, and out of the 

 vast array of facts at his command has picked out those 

 suitable to his views on the recent origin of man. Many 

 of his facts are true, but they are so grouped as 

 to lead the reader to a wrong conclusion. Many of 

 his asserted facts are untrue. The work is a sequel to 

 "The Recent Origin of Man," reviewed in this journal, 

 and is to a large extent an answer to the crjticism 

 which it tfien provoked. We regret that the author 

 has not profited by his experience and that he should 

 have expended so much trouble in attempting to 

 prove a negative which in the nature of things cannot 

 be proved. 



The author's aim is to show that man has not appeared 

 on the earth more than six or ten thousand years. He 

 starts from the historical basis offered by the Bible, and 

 in support of chronologfy ingrafted on the Holy Writ by 

 the unfortunate ingenuity of Archbishop Usher, and in 

 defence of the high civilisation of primeval man, he seizes 

 some of the scraps of history flung out in the struggle 

 between various Babylonian and Egyptian scholars. He 

 adds to these his own views of the discoveries at 

 Hissarlik and Mycsene, and the recent results of explora- 

 tion in Etruscan tombs and dwellings in Italy, ultimately 

 Vol. xyiii. — No. 453 



arriving at the conclusion that man is not older in the 

 Mediterranean area than ten thousand years. To all this 

 the obvious answer suggests itself, that history can tell us 

 nothing as to the antiquity of the human race, because 

 written characters, essential to history, are the result of a 

 high civilisation. How long it took mankind to work out 

 through picture writing a record of the past is an idle 

 question, since we have no data bearing on the point ; but 

 we cannot believe that the art of writing was elaborated 

 in a short time. "Fortes vixere ante Agamemnona" 

 whose names we know not. 



To attempt to circumscribe the antiquity of man within 

 the limits of history appears to us as idle and barren an 

 attempt as could possibly be undertaken. It would be as 

 reasonable to seek figs growing on thistles as to look for 

 any proof of the recent origin of man in the written 

 record. These facts are so obvious in the present con- 

 dition of knowledge, that we should not bring them 

 before our readers were they not utterly ignored by 

 the author of this work, as well as by some of his 

 critics. 



Our author having established to his own satisfaction 

 the recent origin of man in the Mediterranean countries, 

 enters into the question of the unity of the human race. 

 The pre-Christian cross, either in the form of the handle 

 cross of the Mediterranean districts or the Swastika of 

 the Buddhists, was widely spread among ancient peoples^ 

 The tradition of a deluge is almost universal. That of a 

 terrestrial paradise is widely spread : we read of the 

 gardens of Alcinous and Laertes, of the Asgard of the 

 Scandinavians, and of sundry other gardens mentioned 

 in various writers Indian, Chinese, and Arabian. Then 

 we have Megalithic monuments scattered over widely- 

 separated countries, and the habit of distorting the 

 human skull, and of scalping. The range, also, of the 

 boomerang, pointed out by Gen. Lane Fox, the custom 

 of depositing flint implements in graves, and of worship- 

 ping phalli and serpents, are taken to " prove the unity 

 of the race, almost without any other argument on the 

 subject." 



Then the author proceeds to his application, " If the 

 human race is one, the Egyptian, the Hindoo, the Baby- 

 lonian, and the palaeolithic tribes of the Somme Valley 

 were one ; and if Kephren and Cheops were near of kin 

 to the fossil man of Mentone or the savage who owned 

 the Neanderthal skull, and if, moreover, the antiquity of 

 man in Babylonia does not go farther back than some 

 ten thousand years, then the men of the French and 

 English river gravels cannot be more than ten thousand 

 years old. The reverse would only be possible on the 

 hypothesis that the Egyptians were the descendants of 

 the men of the Somme Valley. But this is excluded 

 by the fact that the Egyptians appear at once as a 

 civilised race; and, as we have stated, there are no 

 earlier remains of any kind in Egypt" (p. 21). We 

 give this as an example of the style of reasoning. 

 So far as we know, nobody, not even the author, has 

 ventured to assert that the two Egyptian kings above 

 mentioned "were near of kin" to the so-called fossil 

 man of Mentone, or stood in any near relationship to- 

 any of the ancient inhabitants of Europe. The argument 

 is to us wholly unintelligible. Why should the Egyptians 

 be descended from the men of the Somme Valley any 



