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to remove the greater part of the land now occupied by sea between 

 Sicily and Africa. Nor is this all ; for if Dr. Falconer and Baron 

 Anca be right in their belief of Man having been a contemporary 

 with the Hippopotamus, the most probable explanation seems to me 

 to be this,— that since the commencement of man's existence there 

 must have been a continent, now submerged, with the exception of 

 those parts of it that now form Sicily, Malta, and Gozo, through which 

 a great river flowed, in whose waters vast herds of those monstrous 

 animals swam, and on whose marshy banks they bred for successive 

 generations. 



Modern discoveries in ethnology and philology afford cumulating 

 proofs of the very remote antiquity of the human race. The Rev. 

 Dr. Williams, in his review of Bunscn's ' Biblical Researches,' ob- 

 serves : — " There is no point in which arehreologists of all shades 

 were so nearly unanimous as in the belief that our Biblical chro- 

 nology was too narrow in its limits ; and the enlargement of our 

 views, deduced from Egyptian records, is extended by our author's 

 reasonings on the development of commerce and government, and 

 still more of languages, and physical features of race. How many 

 years are needed to develope modern French out of Latin, and Latin 

 itself out of its original crude forms ! How unlike is English to 

 Welsh, and Greek to Sanskrit, yet all indubitably of one family of 

 languages ! What years were required to create the existing diver- 

 gence of members of this family ! How many more for other families, 

 separated by a wide gulf from this, yet retaining traces of a primeval 

 aboriginal affinity, to have developed themselves, either in priority 

 or collaterally ! The same consonantal roots, appearing either as 

 verbs inflected with great variety of grammatical form, or as nouns 

 with case-endings in some languages and with none in others, plead 

 as convincingly as the succession of strata in geology for enormous 

 lapses of time*." 



There undoubtedly exists a widespread belief that the first ex- 

 istence of man belongs to a period not very remote from history or 

 tradition. Every discovery which threw a doubt on the correctness 

 of that belief was, until very recently, regarded, even by well- 

 instructed geologists, as an imperfect observation, in which con- 

 comitant circumstances had been overlooked, which would have 

 shown that the inference of a great antiquity was erroneous ; nor 

 have those who were led to make such inferences been always 

 exempt from the charge of irreverently maintaining opinions at 

 variance with Sacred Writ. To what cause can we ascribe this 

 incredulity? How does it arise that, while the statements of 

 geologists that other organic bodies existed millions of years ago are 

 tacitly accepted, their conclusions as to man having existed many 

 thousands of years ago should be received with hesitation by some 

 geologists, and be altogether repudiated by no inconsiderable number 

 among other educated classes of society ? It is true that negative 

 proof is brought forward that human bones have never been found 

 associated with those of extinct animals ; but granting this to be 

 correct, which recent discoveries show that it is not (and the rarity 

 * Essays and Keyiews, p. 54. London, 1860. 



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