82 



NATURE 



\j\Iay 27, 18S0 



which is fully described in the communications already 

 alluded to. By this means the positions of the various 

 inequalities around twenty-four days have been indicated 

 on the time-scale. I have next taken two of these and 

 attempted to eliminate from them the influence of all 

 neighbouring inequalities, in order to see with what suc- 

 cess it is possible to disentangle the various periods from 

 each other. In order to test this success I have exhibited 

 in the tables on p. 81 the result of this elimination ap- 

 plied to each four years of sun-spot records, and I think 

 it will be manifest to every one that there is such evidence 

 of repetition, that one cannot doubt the reality of the 

 periods therein indicated. I have likewise begun to apply 

 to these records Gen. Strachey's test, and TTith a good 

 result so far as I have yet gone. 



No kind of smoothing or equalisation has been applied, 

 and the elimination has been carried on only to the first 

 stage, so that more accurate determinations will probably 

 result from a further application of labour. 



Balfour Stewart 



r 



PRIMITIVE MAN^ 



IT is a familiar fact that from time to time wrong-headed 

 but enthusiastic persons appear in the scientific 

 arena boldly challenging the truth of some one or other 

 of the most firmly-established and essential doctrines of 

 the scientific creed. Sometimes a clever investigator 

 discovers that we moderns are all in the wrong, and that 

 the sun after all goes round the earth ; another will have 

 it that the moon does not revolve on its axis ; a third 

 ^iri'^."" f^f" correctness of the theory of gravitation; 

 whilst a fourtYi u.,.. . difficulty whatever tn squaring 



^ ""'v, ; .,,'""? ."'^",^''"'''?;-Vd "P at intervall 

 throughout the historical period. Tnt; -.„ ^ without 

 their usefulness in their generation, for they attom „.^o 

 little mirth, and give an opportunity sometimes to men of 

 science to reconsider their standpoints and settle them- 

 selves more firmly upon them. It seems uncertain whether 

 Prof. Dawson, of i\IcGill College, ]\Iontreal, is to be 

 classed with these malcontents, or whether his scientific 

 heresies are to be explained as conforming to the general 

 law that superstitions generally survive and even thrive in 

 colonies long after they have died out in their mother 

 country. 



No greater contrast could well be conceived than is 

 presented by the two works on Primitive Man which have 

 just appeared, and which form the subject of the present 

 article. 



Prof. Boyd Dawkins, in accordance with the teachings 

 set forth in his " Cave Hunting " and all other works 

 which have proceeded from his pen, treats his subject in 

 a thoroughly scientific and unprejudiced manner, and the 

 results which he lays before his readers are in keeping 

 with the conclusions now fully accepted by all anthropo- 

 logists and admitted by educated persons generally. Prof. 

 Dawson, on the other hand, has actually written a book at 

 this presenttime, the object of which is to attempt to show 

 that mankind first made its appearance on the earth not 

 more than 6,000 or S,oco years ago. He sums up thus : — 

 "What evidence the future may bring forth I do not 

 know, but that available at present points to the appear- 

 ance of man with all his powers and properties in the 

 Post-glacial age of geology, and not more than 6,000 to 

 8,000 years ago." His book is described as "an attempt 

 to illustrate the characters and condition of prehistoric men 

 in Europe by those of the American races." His argu- 

 ments are old stagers long ago upset. Such, for example, as 

 that because some savages, such as the Veddahs of Ceylon, 

 who are degraded Singhalese, are degenerate, therefore 



' " Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period." By W. 

 Boyd Da«'kins, M.A., F.R.S.. &c. (London : Macmillan and Co., t88o.) 

 "Fossil Men and their Modern Representatives." By J. W. Dawson, 

 LL.D., F.R.S., &c., McCill College, Montreal. (Londcn ; Hodder and 

 Stcughton, 1880.) 



all savages are the degenerate offspring of highly-cultivated 

 races. On similar grounds we might infer that because 

 barnacles and ascidians can be shown to be degenerate 

 animals, therefore all lower animals have undergone 

 "degeneration," to use Prof. Ray Lankester's term, and 

 all monkeys are degenerate men. 



The main argument of the book is however apparently 

 that derived from the results of excavations made on the 

 site of Montreal. On this site, as we know from Cartier's 

 narrative, stood in 1535 the native town of Hochelaga, 

 which was fortified, as shown in the plan of the town at 

 the end of the third volume of Ramusio's collection of 

 Voyages and Travels, by means of a circular triple wall 

 of wooden beams, the outer of which were inclined to 

 meet one another at the summit. The native town, its 

 huts and walls, naturally disappeared within a century, 

 and all that now remains of it are the implements and 

 bones which are to be dug out on its site, and of which 

 Prof. Dawson gives an interesting account. There are 

 tobacco pipes of various kinds, stone weapons, pottery, 

 and bones of animals and men. If it had not been for 

 Cartier's visit and published narrative antiquarians might 

 have ascribed a very early date to these remains, argues 

 the author, therefore in all cases where a very early date 

 has been assigned to human remains of the paLxolithic 

 age in Europe a similar error has been committed. We 

 cannot follow Prof. Dawson through his attempts to 

 contort the data of modern science into accordance with 

 Chaldrean cosmogonies and mythology as familiar to us 

 in Jewish dress. He gravely refers the remains found 

 at the camping ground at Solutre which, according to M. 

 de Mortillet, mark a special epoch (the Solutrian) in the 

 palreolithic age, to the antediluvian epoch, and reminds 

 us how Jabal, before the flood, according to Genesis, 

 initiated the nomadic mode of life, suggesting that the 

 old inhabitants of Solutre who hunted the mammoth, the 

 cavi.u»„ and cave bear, were Jabalites. It is delightful 

 to find how beuuviciiy everything fits into its place when 

 freely interpreted by Proi. Dawqnn The results of his 

 ethnographical and antiquarian researches appear to be 

 more or less summed up in the biblical text, " God 

 shall enlarge Japhet, and he shall dwell in the tents of 

 Shem, and Canaan shall be his servant." This means, as 

 he aptly explain?, that the Aryan or Japetic races were 

 to be endowed with '• the higher control of the physical 

 forces and the greater power of expansion and propa- 

 gandism," in short, amongst other exploits, to exter- 

 minate the Redskins and colonise America ; whilst the 

 Semitic races were to receive historical and spiritual 

 revelations, and Canaan in the text represents unprogressive 

 humanity generally. 



Prof. Dawson's intimate acquaintance with the details 

 of prehistoric religion is most startling. He holds up the 

 faith of pateolithic, ox palciocosinic, man, as he prefers to 

 call him, as a warning and a pattern to the degraded Ritu- 

 alist, at whom he cannot help having a dig even with palaso- 

 lithic weapons, being evidently a staunch I'rotestant. He 

 slays evolutionists with the same thrust. It is an unex- 

 pected honour for them to die in such company. No 

 doubt the association is meant to give the Ritualists the 

 hardest dig. He wishes " distinctly to affirm that the pre-' 

 historic religions, and what we call heathenism or animism 

 of untaught tribes, were nearer to God and truth than are 

 either the ritualisms and idolatries or the materialistic 

 scepticisms of more civilised times, when men, ' professing 

 themselves to be wise, become fools.' " Till we read this 

 passage it seemed to us that Prof. Dawson professed him- 

 self throughout his book to be very wise indeed, but of 

 course he cannot have intended to pose in that attitude. 

 The chapter concludes by calling on "all men everywhere 

 to repent," and so we do heartily of having followed so 

 far Prof. Dawson's, shall we call it " ivisdom"? 



We turn with relief to Prof. Boyd Dawkins's fine 

 volume. It is sumptuously printed, and contains 168 



