200 



MONDAY, JANUAEY 23, 1865. 



"William Henry Hardinge, Esq., in the Chair. 



Mr. John Locke, A. B., by permission of the Academy, read the 

 following paper : — 



On the Antiquity of Man. 



" Wast thou born before Adam ?"— Job, xt. 7 (Heath's Translation). 



Certain writers assume a gradational progress from a natural condition 

 of savagery to the ascendant intellect of the nineteenth century, — refer- 

 ring the aboriginal human animal, with his imperfect appliances of 

 stone, horn, wood, and bone, to an indefinitely remote, because unchro- 

 nicled era ; but neither history nor experience furnishes tangible or 

 reliable evidence in support of such an equably continuous develope- 

 ment, unbroken by retrogression and revolution. Declension from a 

 state of comparative civilization to barbarism seems, indeed, cumula- 

 tively rapid ; but of the converse — spontaneous progression ab infra, 

 from savagery to civilization, apart from introduction of extern aid, or 

 special supplement of Christian culture — we have no authenticated ex- 

 ample. In fact, the theorist in archaeology frames, however uncon- 

 sciously, his own introspective notion of time as measured by an arbitrary 

 sequence of developement in uniformly advancing series, and applies 

 this imaginary rule unconformably to the past,* as if time itself were 

 the generative cause, and not a mere passive condition of entities and 

 events. He cannot legitimately summon geology to his aid in pro- 

 pounding the pre- Adamite existence of man, until experts in that sci- 

 ence have welded geological to secular duration (if that shall ever be 

 accomplished), by modifying the stratagraphical classification, interca- 

 lating a new, or filling up more definitely the subdivisions of a quater- 

 nary period ; and extended paleeontological observations tend rather to 

 justify the induction, that the Pleistocene, containing associated relics 

 of man and fossil remains of extinct animals, must be advanced within 

 the Adamic epoch, than that the introduction of man upon our planet 



* The chronometry of some geologists is liable to a similar error of uniformitari- 

 anism in their theories of formation and modification of strata — forgetting that cata- 

 strophes, rarely occurrent within modern experience, have alternated in past ages more 

 frequently and over wider areas with the imperceptible yet continuous processes of 

 change ; great physical cataclysms suddenly overwhelming or altering the geographical 

 and geological aspect of vast portions of the terraqueous globe. 



An apt illustration has been used to show the absurdity of estimating the duration of 

 the past upon the basis of uniformity of geological change — e.g. — An adult attained his 

 full height of six feet three inches by growth of one quarter inch during the last year, 

 therefore he must be 300 years old ; a conclusion not a whit more absurd than some 

 numerical guesses at geological duration. 



