253 THi: CHAIN OF LIFE. 



disproved by the observations of others. For example, no 

 count y was at one time richer in supposed evidences of the 

 antiquity of man than Scandinavia ; but Professor Torell, the di- 

 rector of the Geological Survey of Sweden, has recently made a 

 careful re-examination of the facts, and has found that tlierc is 

 no evidence whatever of the existence of man in Scandinavia 

 before the Neolithic or polished stone age. There are, how- 

 ever, evidences of considerable changes of level since that 

 time, and it would seem even since the twelfth century of our 

 era. The remarkable and seemingly inexcusable errors of 

 observation referred to in Professor Torell' s memoir, should 

 enforce a caution on geologists as to the uncertainties of such 

 evidence. Lyell sifted the testimony bearing on this subject 

 with great care in the first edition of his Antiquity of Man. 

 In later editions he had to make large abatements, nnd now 

 much of the evidence in the latest edition would have to be 

 withdrawn or otherwise applied. 



From all these considerations the conclusion is obvious that 

 while we have no certain data for assigning a definite number of 

 years to the residence of man on the earth, we have no geo- 

 logical evidence for the rash assertion often made that m com- 

 parison with historical periods the date of the earliest races of 

 men recedes into a dim, mysterious, and measureless antiquity. 

 On the basis of that Lyellian principle of the application of 

 modern causes to explain past changes, which is the stable 

 foundation of modern geology, we fail to erect any such 

 edifice as the indefinite antiquity of man, or to extend this 

 comparatively insignificant interval to an equality with the long 

 neons of the preceding Tertiary. The demand for such in- 

 definite extension of the history of man rests not on geological 

 facts, but on the necessities of hypotheses which, whatever 

 their foundation, have no basis in the discoveries of that science, 

 and are not required to account for the sequence which it 

 disposes. 



