341 
When Mr. Croll’s theory is taken out of the way, the geological evidence 
for the high antiquity of man resolves itself into two questions : — 1st. Does 
the contemporaneousness of man with certain extinct mammals prove the 
antiquity of man or the comparative recency of those mammals themselves ? 
2nd. Are the conjectural estimates with regard to the growth of stalagmite, 
and the periods required for the erosion of certain beds of gravel, involving 
many elements of a most vague and conjectural kind, a sufficient ground for 
• uperseding and treating as non-existent the distinct and definite statements 
of Scripture with regard to man’s creation and the period when it occurred ? 
These estimates would all be modified at once by the physical consequences 
which must have resulted from such a fact as the Flood of Noah, however 
brief the period of its actual duration. With regard to erosioD, five months, 
under the circumstances narrated in Gen. ix., might, and probably would, 
produce effects which could not be wrought by 50,000, or even 800,000 years 
of change under the present and modern conditions of gradual and almost 
insensible change, when the deep has been shut up in its “ decreed place,” 
and the surface of the ground has been dry, and when great but more moderate 
changes of the sea-level have only occurred at intervals of many thousand 
years. 
The six days of creation in the first page of Scripture are, in my judgment, 
a definite line of separation, drawn by God Himself, between indefinite ages of 
chaos and darkness and the successive seasons of a Divine cosmos. I have 
little faith in the success of those who take their stand on the edge of chaos, 
and gaze intently on its darkness only, in measuring out intervals of time in 
that dark chaos so exactly as to form any scientific presumption whatever 
against conclusions drawn from an inductive study of the whole testimony of 
Scripture with regard to the plan and course of Divine Providence for the last 
6,000 years. 
I think Professor Hughes’s paper is a valuable contribution towards a fair 
and impartial estimate on the conjectures on the one side and the definite 
evidence on the other. 
REMARKS BY REY. HENRY BRASS, M.A., F.G.S. 
A yEKY able, thoughtful, impartial paper, and a valuable contribution to 
this important controversy ; but the concluding remarks are to me far from 
satisfactory. 
(1.) It is assumed that no changes in the level of the valleys of the Thames, 
Somme, &c., can have taken place during what the author calls “ a very large 
multiple of the historic times.” Yet such changes of level have recently 
