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Lyellian doctrines, and puts forth his own opposing views in a concise, 

 clever pamphlet of twenty pages ; and he assails his opponent at any rate 

 with righteous weapons. Mr. Pattison begins by putting Archbishop 

 Usher and the biblical chronologers against Sir Charles's arguments that 

 man has existed certainly 7000 years, probably twice as long, possibly four 

 times as long. Are these deductions warranted by the evidence ? is Mr. 

 Pattison's question, which he proceeds forthwith to answer. To the 

 Lyellian arguments on the first point, that western Europe has been in- 

 habited by man for more than 7000 years, Mr. Pattison quotes Sir Charles 

 of old against Sir Charles of late, not always quite correctly to our mind, 

 but generally fairly. His grand quotation attack — that Lyell formerly 

 quoted from Gerard, the historian of the Valley of the Somme, that in the 

 " lowest tier of that moss was found a boat loaded with bricks " — will not 

 hold good in scientific argument. If the peat or the deposit on which a 

 heavy-laden boat sank down were soft, there is no doubt that the boat 

 would " swaddle " down to the very bottom of the soft stratum, be it mud 

 or peat, until it rested on a hard bottom ; and a boat sunk twenty years ago 

 might even be dug out to-day from the lowest portion of a peat bog, or 

 the oozy bed of a river. Mr. Pattison's reasoning on the age of the Danish 

 peat, that the separate deposits of pine, oak, and beech were due to the 

 successive surrendering to decay at distinct periods of woods of different 

 hardness, is much more ingenious, and must more or less subject what has 

 been hitherto written and said on the subject to further scrutiny. It is, how- 

 ever, this disregard of this element of the sinking of heavy bodies through 

 soft and readily-yielding deposits that has given rise to the generally 

 incorrect idea of " 7000 years being sufficient for the growth of all the peat 

 on the face of the globe." Thick beds of peat may be formed in such a 

 space of time, but we must not thence conclude that all peat-beds have 

 been formed in an equally short space of time. Mr. Pattison's remarks 

 on cave-deposits, gravel, and brick-earth, are also very good, although we 

 do not concur in his remarks on the absence of evidence of any changes in 

 the shores of the British Channel within the Historic period, which would 

 give a measure for the antiquity of the later post-Tertiary deposits on 

 both sides of that " narrow sea." The legends of Cornwall and Brittany 

 must not be lost sight of, as indicating great and very ancient changes, so 

 remote, that the legends read now to us like myths. Neither must the 

 traces of ancient forests, which the fishermen's trawls and the dredge 

 bring up, be altogether forgotten or ignored. A British Association grant 

 to an active explorer would bring out much singular information on this 

 point. 



" There is nothing," Mr. Pattison concludes, "in the ascertained facts 

 of geology, nothing in the exhaustive volume before us (Lyell's), to forbid 

 the hypothesis, that at some period after the final retreat of the glaciers 

 man found his way into these regions as a wandering hunter, probably 

 from a distant geographical centre ; that he resorted to these parts at in- 

 tervals during several thousand years ; that its pebble-beds afforded him 

 implements, and its grassy plains abundant game ; that in the intervals of 

 his occupation the earth was rent, in connection with volcanic action dying 

 out in the Eifel and Auvergne, floods occurred, the loose materials of the 

 surface were washed into crevices or spread out in heaps ; that many of 

 the great mammals became extinct, some so lately as the mammoth, whose 

 flesh was found in ice at the mouth of the Neva. For upwards of 4000 

 years, all things were in course of becoming what they now are ; and what 

 they so became, they have remained, save surface accumulations and 

 minor changes, for the last 2000 years and upwards. For aught that geo- 



