IV MODERN EVOLUTION 229 



1 reconciliations ' emptying the old cosmogony of 

 all its poetry, and therefore of its value as a key 

 to primitive ideas, and converting it into bastard 

 science. Thus a temporary, because artificial, unity, 

 was set up. But with the evidence supplied by 

 study of the ancient life whose remains are imbedded 

 in the fossil-yielding strata, that unity is shivered. 

 In a scripture that 'cannot be broken' there was 

 read the story of conflict and death aeons before man 

 appeared. Between this record, and that which 

 spoke of pain and death as the consequences of 

 man's disobedience to the frivolous prohibition of 

 an anthropomorphic God, there is no possible 

 reconciliation. 



To the evidence from fossiliferous beds was 

 added evidence from old river-gravels and limestone 

 caverns. The relics extracted from the stalagmitic 

 deposits in Kent's Hole, near Torquay, had lain, 

 for some years, unheeded save as 'curios,' when M. 

 Boucher de Perthes saw in the worked flints of a 

 somewhat rougher type which he found mingled with 

 the bones of rhinoceroses, cave-bears, mammoths, or 

 woolly-haired elephants, and other mammals in the 

 1 drift ' or gravel -pits of Abbeville, in Picardy, the 

 proofs of man's primitive savagery, so far as Western 

 Europe was concerned. The presence of these 

 rudely-chipped flints had been noticed by M. de 

 Perthes in 1839, but he could not persuade savants 

 to admit that human hands had shaped them, until 

 these doubting Thomases saw for themselves like 

 implements in situ at a depth of seventeen feet from 

 the original surface of the ground. That was in 

 1858, a year before the publication of the Origin 



