6 9 8 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the charge of gross carelessness in citation 

 of testimony, and his paragraph is " mani- 

 festly founded on errors" for which it is 

 hard to find any plausible excuse 



Lyell writes in the chapter already quoted, 

 when referring to this fossil (which, by the 

 way, was not, as Major Powell says, a human 

 skeleton, but merely a broken pelvic bone) : 



" After visiting the spot in 1846, I de- 

 scribed the geological position of the bones 

 and discussed their probable age with a 

 stronger bias, I must confess, to the ante- 

 cedent improbability of the contemporaneous 

 entombment of man and the mastodon than 

 any geologist would now be justified in en- 

 tertaining" (p. 200). "My reluctance in 

 1846 to regard the fossil human bone as of 

 post-pliocene date arose in part from the re- 

 flection that the ancient loess of Natchez is 

 anterior in time to the whole modern delta 

 of the Mississippi .... If I was right in cal- 

 culating that this delta has required more 

 than one hundred thousand years for its 

 growth, it would follow, if the claims of the 

 Natchez man to have coexisted with the 

 mastodon are admitted, that North America 

 was peopled more than a thousand centuries 

 ago by the human race. But even were that 

 true we could not presume, reasoning from 

 ascertained geological data, that the Natchez 

 bone was anterior in date to the antique flint 

 hatchets of St. Acheul .... Changes of level 

 as great as that here implied have actually 

 occurred in Europe during the human epoch, 

 and may therefore have happened in Amer- 

 ica .... Should future researches, therefore, 

 confirm the opinion that the Natchez man 

 coexisted with the mastodon, it would not 

 enhance the value of the geological evidence 

 in favor of man's antiquity, but merely ren- 

 der the delta of the Mississippi available as 

 a chronometer." 



The principles of exegesis which allow 

 the extraction from these words of an affir- 

 mation that the bone was not found in the 

 loess but in the " overplacement " are decid- 

 edly original and may be valuable in a case 

 of urgent need. They recall to one's mind 

 Prof. Huxley's satire on the Hebrew lan- 

 guage. A case that stands in need of logic 

 so bad and of quotation so erroneous must 

 indeed be in a sorry plight. Sir C. Lyell 

 evidently had no intention of denying the 

 antiquity of the human pelvis. With char- 

 acteristic caution he suspended judgment, 

 and no one has any right to wrest his lan- 

 guage in either direction. Whether ancient 

 or not ancient, whether fraud or forgery or 

 fact, matters not here. Testimony has been 

 misquoted and authority misapplied. We 

 plead not here for the genuineness or an- 

 tiquity of the Mississippi man, but for fair- 

 ness in logic and accuracy in statement. 



We can not avoid the impression that in 

 another place Major Powell somewhat trans- 

 gresses the limits of accuracy where he says : 



" Prof. Wright stands almost alone in his 

 advocacy of a scientific doctrine. He has 



a few sympathizers and some defenders of 

 some portions of his theory, but the great 

 body of his work is repudiated by nearly 

 every geologist in America and especially by 

 the professorial corps." 



The latter part of this extract may be 

 true, but so far as they have declared them- 

 selves the following may rightly be claimed 

 on his side : Dana, Hitchcock, Emerson, 

 Crosby, Upham, and Bell. Others, in view 

 of the pending discussion, await further evi- 

 dence. Abroad a longer list of names may 

 be drawn up, including that of the venerable 

 Prestwich, ex-Professor of Geology at Oxford, 

 Hughes, of Cambridge, Lamplugh, Crosskey, 

 Kendall, and Dugald Bell in Great Britain, 

 Falsan in France, Credner and Diener in 

 Germany, Hoist of Sweden, and Nitikin, 

 state geologist of Russia. Sir H. H. Howorth 

 says in a recent work,* " While the theory 

 of a plurality of glacial periods has found 

 several advocates in Germany, the French 

 geologists are virtually unanimous on the 

 other side." With such a list Prof. Wright 

 stands " alone " in good company. 



The scientific imagination is a faculty of 

 the highest order and of great value so long 

 as it is held in check by reason and knowl- 

 edge. But when Pegasus runs or flies away 

 with his rider, the result is often disastrous 

 to the latter. We have already given proof 

 of Major Powell's great command over the 

 realm of fiction. He will excuse us if we 

 further illustrate his supremacy in this re- 

 gion by another equally striking quotation. 

 Writing of the so-called palaeolithic imple- 

 ments recently found in New Jersey and some 

 other places in the Eastern States, he says : 



" These implements were gathered in 

 very great numbers and collected in various 

 museums in the United States and many col- 

 lections were sent abroad to the great mu- 

 seums of the world. Several different collect- 

 ors were engaged in this enterprise for some 

 years and acquired great reputation for their 

 proof of the antiquity of man on this conti- 

 nent and for their zeal in discovering the evi- 

 dence, and to recompense them for this work 

 they were made members of many scientific 

 societies throughout the world and decorated 

 with ribbons, and some were knighted." 



We took the liberty in our last paper of 

 calling indirectly on Major Powell for exact 

 details regarding the Nampa image, but 

 without very great success. Will he allow 

 us respectfully to ask for some further par- 

 ticulars concerning this very startling para- 

 graph of his, in order to remove the suspicion 

 that spontaneously but irresistibly lurks in 

 our mind that it too is " based on error " ? It 

 would be deeply interesting to the archaeolo- 

 gists of this country and of others to learn 

 where are the " very great numbers " of 

 these palseoliths from New Jersey, in what 

 " museums of the United States " they are 

 stored, and to what " foreign institutions 



* The Glacial Nightmare and the Flood, p. 469. 



