Wilson’s prehistoric man. 
27 
In some respects, perhaps, Dr. Wilson’s work might he shortened 
with great advantage; thus, in alluding to Kent’s Cavern, it was 
surely unnecessary to transcribe Macaulay’s well-known descrip¬ 
tion of Torquay. Extensive reading, great power of word-painting, 
and impetuous enthusiasm render Dr. Wilson’s statements some¬ 
times obscure if not contradictory. His very last paragraph is an 
eloquent expression of his satisfaction that, in the light which archae¬ 
ology has thrown on the age of man, there is “ a welcome evidence of 
“ harmony between the disclosures of science and the dictates of reve- 
“ lation.” Had, then, the Doctor any secret misgivings on this point ? 
Such a state of mind is a mystery to us; but, indeed, this is not 
the only occasion in which the Doctor, clear enough on purely scien¬ 
tific questions, becomes unintelligible as soon as he treads on sacred 
ground. Eor instance, at the close of his chapter on the “ Primeval 
Instinct,” he says, “ And now that it seems almost certainly demon- 
“ strable on archaeological, and also on geological grounds, that the 
“ human family was widely dispersed over the face of the earth at the 
“ earliest possible date at which we can reconcile chronologies of 
“ science and revelation, possibly some may be tempted to return to 
“ their old convictions, that when * all the fountains of the great deep 
“ were broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened, and the 
“ rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights; and the waters 
“'prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills that 
“ were under the whole heaven were covered,’ that it actually 
“ was so.” The logic of this sentence has puzzled us very much, but 
the following statements with reference to instinct and reason are 
still more bewildering. 
In Yol. i. p. 91, he says—“The Palseontogists’ one perfect speci- 
“ men of an extinct species, is for every purpose of science a speci- 
“ men of all examples of such; even as the naturalists’ history of one 
“ specific zoophyte, ant, or beaver, is the history of all. . “of 
“ their works, as of their organic structure, one example is a sufficient 
“ type of the wholeand then, after a quotation from ‘ Montgomery’s 
Pelican Island,’ he goes on to contrast this invariability of instinct 
with the diversity of human art. “ But with the relics of human art, 
even in its most primitive and rudimentary forms, it is far otherwise. 
Each example possesses an individuality of its ownand his conclu¬ 
sion is that “ the instincts of the inferior orders of creation are in vain 
“ compared with the devices of man.” How, in P. 161, he says— 
“ The bee, according to Huber, when interrupted in its cell-building 
“ operations, adapted its structure to the novel circumstances imposed 
“ on it, altering the otherwise invariable hexagon. The bird, in like 
“ manner, accommodates the form of its nest to the peculiarities of the 
“ chosen locality ; as if making the instinctive process subservient to the 
“ rational .” Thus the cell and the nest which were so invariable in 
p. 94, are, in p. 161, modified as soon as “ novel circumstances are 
imposed on ” them. So also the individuality which, according to 
p. 94, is impressed on every example of human art, vanishes, in p. 264, 
