XCVlll 



with the Kawi speech of Southern Asia, and the use of the same imple- 

 ment for blowing the fires in smelting iron in Madagascar as that used 

 for the same purpose in the Asiatic Islands, being a hollow cane worked 

 on the principle of the air-pump, instead of the skin-bellows in modern 

 use in the interior of Africa, strongly point in the same direction. On 

 the other hand, modern researches doncerning the most ancient peoples 

 of Babylon, Southern Arabia, Egypt, and Africa north of the Sahara 

 (as summed up by Lenormant and Chevallier), all go to show that 

 those regions were peopled by streams of migration across the lower 

 Indus from Hindustan of the reddish-brown or yellowish types, the Cush 

 of the Bible. Yet it might be hazardous to say, in the present state of 

 our knowledge, that it is impossible that the negroes of Africa may have 

 originated in the African centre, the tropical home of the African Simi- 

 dse and of the black chimpanzee and gorilla. 



Twenty years ago, geologists did not admit that man was older than 

 the recent alluvial deposits. The discovery of flint implements in the 

 Valley of the Somme convinced them that he must be carried back to the 

 Post-Pleiocene* age of the mammoth and cave bear. As to time, not to 

 speak of other recent discoveries, the scientific work of Evans on the 

 " Flint Implements of Great Britain" is enough to demonstrate that the 

 length of the human period has been so inconceivably vast that any at- 

 tempt to reckon it in years, whether by thousands or millions, would be 

 idle, and that it is expressible only by indefinite geological epochs. Mr. 

 Evans compares the age of these implements in England with the period 

 in which the original plateaus (where now are the basins of the Ouse and 

 the Thames), as they were when first finally raised out of the ocean, have 

 been denuded and cut down into the present basins and valleys of those 

 rivers; during which, also, large areas of land and at least one whole 

 river valley have been swept into the English Channel. Another measure 

 may be conceived by ascending from the Iron Age to the Bronze Age, 

 and thence to the Stone Age, and then considering that this age of sim- 

 ply flint implements may be divided into at least three vast periods, char- 

 acterized, first, by rudely worked flints; then by flint skillfully chipped to 

 fine edges; and, finally, by polished flints, ground smooth and sharp by 

 rubbing them on grit-stones. . 



But geologists will have to trace these human remains still further 

 back, and even far into the Miocene period, before they arrive at the 

 anthropoid Dryopithecus of that age, which Mr. Darwin suggests as in- 

 dicative of the point of transition, in the course of linear branching de- 

 scent, from the anthropoid to the completely human type.. And what 

 objection can there be to that, if it pleased the Creator to take that length 

 of time for His work and to do it in that way? 



