414 



NATURE 



\Atigust 28, 1879 



reality, they give some idea of it. And what concerns us here is 

 that theoretical early Aryan and Semitic, or other such recon- 

 structed languages, do not bring our minds appreciably nearer to 

 really primitive forms of speech. However far we get back, the 

 signs of development from still earlier stages are there. The 

 roots have mostly settled into forms which no longer show the 

 reasons why they were originally chosen, while the inflexions only 

 in part preserve traces of their original senses, and the whole 

 structure is such as only a long-lost past can account for. To 

 illustrate this important point, let us remember the system of 

 grammatical gender in Greek or German, how irrationally a 

 classification by sex is applied to sexless objects and thoughts, 

 while even the use of a neuter gender fails to set the confusion 

 straight, and sometimes even twists it with a new perversity of 

 its own. Many a German and Frenchman wishes he could 

 follow the example of our English forefathers who, long ago, 

 threw overboard the whole worthless cargo of grammatical 

 gender. But looking at gender in the ancient grammars, it must 

 be remembered that human custom is hardly ever wilfully absurd, 

 its unreasonableness usually arising from loss or confusion of old 

 sense. Thus it can hardly be doubted that the misused gram- 

 matical gender in Hebrew or Greek is the remains of an older 

 and reasonable phenomenon of language ; but if so, this must 

 have belonged to a period earlier than we can assign to the 

 theoretical parent language of either. Lastly, the development 

 of civilisation requires a long period of prehistoric time. Expe- 

 rience and history show that civilisation grew up gradually, while 

 every age preserves recognisable traces of the ages which went 

 before. The woodman's axe of to-day still retains much of the 

 form of its ancestor — the stone celt in its wooden handle ; the 

 mathematician's tables keep up in their decimal rotation a record 

 of the early ages when man's ten fingers first taught him to 

 count ; the very letters with which I wrote these lines may be 

 followed bade to the figure of birds and beasts and other objects 

 drawn by the ancient Egyptians, at first as mere picture-writing 

 to denote the things represented. Yet, when we learn from the 

 monuments what ancient Egyptian life was like towards 5,000 

 years ago, it appears that civilisation had already come on so far 

 that there was an elaborate system of government, an educated 

 literary priesthood, a nation skilled in agriculture, architecture, 

 and metal work. These ancient Egyptians, far from being near 

 the beginning of civilisation, had, as the late Baron Bunsen held, 

 already reached its halfway house. This eminent Egyptologist's 

 moderate estimate of man's age on the earth at about 20,000 

 years has the merit of having been made on historical grounds 

 alone, independently of geological evidence, for the proofs of the 

 existence of man in the quaternary or mammoth period had not 

 yet gained acceptance. 



My purpose in briefly stating here the evidence 'of man's 

 antiquity derived from race, language, and culture, is to insist 

 that these arguments stand on their own ground. It is true that 

 the geological argument from the implements in the drift-gravels 

 and bone-caves, by leading to a general belief that man is 

 extremely ancient on the earth, has now made it easier to 

 anthropologists to maintain a rationally satisfactory theory of the 

 rart^-^yv"^ '^r\(\ m^ntcil H/»v(*Inpmf*nt of mankind. But we should 

 Dy no means give up this vantage-ground, though the ladder we 

 climbed by should break down. Even if it could be proved that 

 the flint implements of Abbeville or Torquay were really not so 

 aiicient as the pyramids of Egypt, this would not prevent us from 

 still assuming, for other and suificient reasons, a period of human 

 life on earth extending many thousand years farther back. 



It b an advantage of this state of the evidence that it to some 

 extent gets rid of the "sensational" element in the problem of 

 fossil man, which it leaves as merely an interesting inquiry into 

 the earliest known relics of savage tribes. Geological criticism 

 has not yet absolutely settled either way the claims of the 

 Abbe Bourgeois' flints from Thenay to be of miocene date, or 

 of Mr. Skertchly's from Brandon to be glacial. The accepted 

 point is that the men who made the ordinary flint implements of 

 the drift lived in the quaternary period characterised by the pre- 

 sence of the mammoth in our part of Europe. More than one 

 geologist, however, has lately maintained that this quaternary 

 IJeriod was not of extreme antiquity. The problem is at what 

 distance from the present time the drift-gravels on the valley 

 slopes can have been deposited by water action up to one hundred 

 feet or so above the present flood-levels. It does not seem the 

 prevailing view among geologists that rivers on the fame small 

 !>cale as those at present occupying mere ditches in the wide 

 valley-floors could have left these deposits on the hill sides at a 



time when they had not yet scooped out the valleys to within 

 fifty or a hundred feet of their present depth. Indeed, such 

 means are insufficient out of all proportion to the results, as a 

 mere look down from the hill-tops into such valleys is enough to 

 show. Geologists connect the deposit of the high drift-gravels 

 with the subsidence and elevation of the land, and the powerful 

 action of ice and water at the close of the Glacial age ; and 

 the term "Pluvial period" is often used to characterise this 

 time of heavy rainfall and huge rivers. It was then that the 

 rude stone implements of palasolithic man were imbedded in the 

 drift-gravels with the remains of the mammoth and fossil rhino- 

 ceros, and we have to ask what events have taken place in these 

 regions since ? The earth's surface has been altered to bring the 

 land and water to their present levels, the huge animals became 

 extinct, the country was inhabited by the tribes whose relics 

 belong to the neolithic or polished-stone age, and afterwards the 

 metal-using Keltic nations possessed the land, their arrival being 

 fixed as previous to 400 B.C., the king of the Gauls then being 

 called by the Romans by the name Brennus, which is simply the 

 Keltic -word for "king" — in modern Welsh irra/n. To take 

 in this succession of events geologists and archaeologists generally 

 hold that a long period is required. Yet there are some few who 

 find room for them all in a comparatively short period. I will 

 mention Principal Dawson, of Montreal, well known as a geolo- 

 gist in this Association, and who has shown his conviction of the 

 soundness of his views by addressing them to the general public 

 in a little volume entitled " The Story of the Earth and Man." 

 Having examined the gravels of St. Acheul, on the Somme, 

 where M. Boucher de Perthes found his celebrated drift imple- 

 ments, it appeared to Dr. Dawson that, taking into account tha 

 probabilities of a different level of the land, a wooded condition 

 of the country and greater rainfall, and a glacial filling up of 

 the Somme valley with clay and stones subsequently cut out by 

 running water, the gravels could scarcely be older than the 

 Abbeville peat, and the age of this peat he estimates as perhaps 

 less than four thousand years. Within this period Dr. Dawson 

 includes a comparatively rapid subsidence of the land, with a 

 partial re-elevation, which left large areas of the lower grounds 

 beneath the sea. This he describes as the geological deluge 

 which separates the post-glacial period from the modem, and the 

 earlier from the later prehistoric period of the archieologists. 



My reason for going here into these computations of Dr. Daw- 

 sou's is that the date about 2,200 B.C., to which he thus assigns 

 these great geological convulsions, is actually witl.in historic 

 times. In Egypt successive dynasties had been reigning for ages, 

 and the pyramids had long been built ; while in Babylonia the 

 old Chaldaean kings had been raising the temples whose ruins 

 still remain. That is to say, we are asked to receive, as matter 

 of geoljgy, that stupendous geological changes w-ere going on 

 not far from the Mediterranean, including a final plunge of I 

 know not how much of the earth's surface beneath the waters, 

 and yet national life on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates 

 went on unbroken and apparently undisturbed through it all. To 

 us in this section it is instructive to see how the free use ol 

 paroxysms and cataclysms makes it possible to shorten up 

 geological time. Accustomed as we are to geology demanding 

 periods of time which often seem to history exorbitant, the tables 

 are now turned, and we are presented with the unusual spectacle 

 of chronology protesting against geology for encroaching on the 

 historical period. 



In connection with the question of quaternary man, it is worth 

 while to notice that the use of llie terms "primseval" or 

 "primitive" man, with reference to the savages of the mammoth 

 period, seems sometimes to lead to unsound inferences. There 

 appears no particular reason to think that the relics from the 

 drift-beds or bone-caves represent man as he first appeared on 

 the earth. The contents of the caves especially bear witness to 

 a'state of savage art, in some respects fairly high, and which 

 may possibly have somewhat fallen off' from an ancestral state in 

 a more favourable climate. Indeed, the savage condition gene- 

 rally, though rude and more or less representing early stages of 

 culture, never looks absolutely primitive, just as no savage lan- 

 guage ever has the appearance of being a primitive language. 

 What the appearance and state of our really primasval ancestors 

 may have been seems too speculative a question, until there shall 

 be more signs of agreement between the (anthropologists, who 

 work back by comparison of actual races of man toward a hypo- 

 thetical common stock, and the zoologists, who approach the 

 problem through the ispecies adjoining the human. There is, 

 however, a point relating to the problem to which attention is 



