2GO MAN AND NATURE. 



eartli he creates and lie destroys. We have to deal 

 with what he does, and what he undoes, in the world 

 of nature around him. And the modes of action in 

 each case are often so indirect, and so little guided by 

 reason or intention so closely blended, moreover, 

 with the operations of Nature herself that our con- 

 clusions are constantly at fault, even on points of 

 greatest practical interest. The judgments of one 

 generation are contradicted by the more matured and 

 larger experiences of the next. 



In the summary view we are about to offer the 

 form of history must be almost wholly discarded. We 

 can give no initial date to the enquiry ; WG know not 

 at what time, chronologically speaking, man first ap- 

 peared on the earth. We are ignorant, or only 

 scantily informed, as to the state of the earth when 

 human existence first dawned upon it. The 'A/o^ 

 that mysterious term, translatable into every language, 

 because common to all human thought, is in this par- 

 ticular case, -as in so many others, far beyond the 

 scope of human research. We have heard and read 

 much lately on this question of the antiquity of man 

 on the globe. Putting aside that theory of our own 

 time, which solves it by assuming his gradual deriva- 

 tion from mammalia lower in the scale of animal life, 

 we yet have not facts sufficient to furnish any more 

 certain answer, as far as time is concerned. The re- 

 cent discoveries of human implements and bones in 

 caverns and elsewhere, associated with the remains of 

 animal species now extinct, have disclosed a compara- 

 tive antiquity of man (possibly also a lower grade of 



