years had been sufficient for the building up of this vast 

 intellectual edifice out of such rude materials as the man 

 and woman of Eden, when the two thousand years 

 following have been productive of so little advancement, 

 notwithstanding the exquisite materials upon which to 

 work that were left for us by the Alexandrian and 

 Athenian sages. We cannot believe so evident an 

 absurdity to-day ; and yet it is little more than half a 

 century since the whole of Christendom accepted without 

 any doubt whatever the old traditional statement of the 

 .Church that man had only inhabited this earth for rather 

 less than six thousand years. 



How is it, then, that we have believed the traditionary 

 story for so long and now reject it as absurd ? People 

 have believed the story of the creation according to 

 Genesis partly because it was dangerous to do otherwise 

 and partly because there was no absolute proof to the 

 contrary. In 1774, however, a German of the name of 

 Esper made a discovery which gave the finishing touch 

 to the mortal wound inflicted upon the Christian and 

 Jewish superstitions by the previous adoption of the 

 Copernican system of astronomy ; and, just as Coperni- 

 cus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton 

 drove the first half-dozen nails into the coffin of the 

 Bible, so did this discovery of Esper drive into it the 

 first of the last half-dozen, the remaining five to be 

 subsequently added by Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, Spencer, 

 and Carpenter. The discovery made by J. F. Esper 

 consisted of some human bones, mingled with remains 

 of the Northern bear and other species then unknown, 

 which were lying in the famous cavern of Gailenreuth, 

 in Bavaria ; and this was soon followed by the discovery, 

 in 1797, by John Frere, at Hoxne, in Suffolk, of a 

 number of flint weapons, mixed up with bones of extinct 

 animals, the whole being embedded in rocks. These 

 and other similar discoveries made some sensation among 

 scientific men, which resulted in the publication, in 1823, 

 of Dr. Buckland's "Reliquiae Diluvianas," in which 

 the author summed up all the facts then known tending 

 to the establishment of the truth that man co-existed 

 with animals long since extinct. Immediately after this, 

 in 1826, Tournal, of Narbonne, gave to the world an 



