EEYIEWS. 
199 
Lyellian doctrines, and puts fortli liis own opposing views in a concise, 
clever pamphlet of twenty pages ; and he assails his opponent at any rate 
with righteous weapons, Mr. Pattipon 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 Id 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 diff'erent 
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 sufilcicnt 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- 
