years old. Natural changes in the course of the Nile, similar to that which we have here mentioned, and some of them, doubtless, much greater have taken place in almost every part of its passage through Egypt."

It is further alleged, that burnt brick was unknown in Egypt till the time of the Romans. "If a coin of Trajan or Diocletian had been found in these spots, even Mr. Horner would have been obliged to admit that he had made a fatal mistake in his conclusions; but a piece of burnt brick, found beneath the soil, tells the same tale that a Roman coin would tell under the same circumstances. There is not a single known structure of burnt brick, from one end of Egypt to the other, earlier than the period of the Roman dominion. These 'fragments of burnt brick,' therefore, have been deposited after the Christian era, and, instead of establishing the existence of man in Egypt more than 13,000 years, supply a convincing proof of the worthlessness of Mr. Horner's theory." †

Sir Charles Lyell notices most of these objections to his theory, and attempts to parry the force of them, but with indifferent success. As to the last, he claims, on the authority of Mr. Birch, of the British Museum, that it is erroneous in fact, there

*

Quarterly Rev., 1859, p. 420.

† Ibid.

being two burnt bricks in the Museum, with inscriptions that refer them to the 18th and 19th dynasties (B. C. 1250-1300). But on the main point of the argument, he confesses what is a virtual abandonment of it. "This conclusion," according to Mr. Horner, "of an average rate of increase of Nile mud equaling five inches in a century, is very vague, and founded on insufficient data, the amount of matter thrown down by the waters in different parts of the plain varying so much that to strike an average with any approach to accuracy must be most difficult." Again, "The experiments instituted by Mr. Horner, in the hope of obtaining an accurate chronometric scale for testing the thickness of Nile sediment, are not considered, by experienced Egyptologists, to have been satisfactory." (pp. 37, 38.)

2. The next instance which I will notice is that of the human fossil discovered in a ravine near Natchez, Miss. The ravine was caused by the earthquakes which occurred in the Mississippi valley in 1811-12, and is named, from the bones found in it, the Mammoth Ravine. Mr. Lyell describes the fossil referred to as follows:

"I satisfied myself that the ravine had been considerably enlarged and lengthened, a short time before my visit, and it was then freshly undermined, and undergoing constant waste. From a clayey deposit, immediately below

*

the yellow loam, bones of the Mastodon Ohioticus, a species of megalonyx, bones of the genera Equus, Bos, and others, some of extinct and some presumed to be of living species, had been detached, and had fallen to the base of the cliffs. Mingled with the rest, the pelvic bone of a man (os innominatum) was obtained by Dr. Dickeson, of Natchez, in whose collection I saw it. It appeared to be quite in the same state of preservation, and was of the same black color, as the other fossils, and was believed to have come, like them, from a depth of about thirty feet from the surface. In my Second Visit to America,' in 1846, I suggested, as a possible explanation of this association of a human bone with the remains of a mastodon and megalonyx, that the former may possibly have been derived from the vegetable soil at the top of the cliff, whereas the remains of extinct mammalia were dislodged from a lower position, and both may have fallen into the same heap, or talus, at the bottom of the ravine. The pelvic bone might, I conceived, have acquired its black color by having lain, for years or centuries, in a dark, superficial, peaty soil, common in that region. I was informed that there were many human bones in old Indian graves in the same district, stained of as black a dye. On suggesting this hypothesis to Colonel Wiley, of Natchez, I found that the same idea had already occurred to his mind. No doubt, had the pelvic bone belonged to any recent mammifer other than man, such a theory would never have been resorted to; but so long as we have only *Vol. ii. p. 197.

one isolated case, and are without the testimony of a geologist who was present to behold the bone when still engaged in the matrix, and to extract it with his own hands, it is allowable to suspend our judgment as to the high antiquity of the fossil." *

Allowable! And is this science, which from the finding of a bone that confessedly may have come from the soil itself, - possibly from an old Indian grave, — makes a merit of its candor in only not claiming it as demonstration that man lived in the Mississippi valley "more than a thousand centuries ago"? Why did not Sir Charles say as much, at least, as that we are required to suspend judgment; or, rather, that the case proves nothing at all, except the willingness of the author to find evidence in support of what was, in his mind, already a foregone conclusion?

3. The next case adduced for the same purpose is that of the skeleton found near New Orleans.

"In one part of the modern delta, near New Orleans, a large excavation has been made for gas works, where a succession of beds, almost wholly made up of vegetable matter, has been passed through, such as we now see forming in the cypress swamps of the neighborhood, where the deciduous cypress (Taxodium distichum), with its strong and spreading roots, plays a conspicuous

* Geological Evidences, pp. 202, 203.

part. In this excavation, at the depth of sixteen feet from the surface, beneath four buried forests, superimposed one upon the other, the workmen are stated by Dr. B. Dowler, to have found some charcoal and a human skeleton, the cranium of which is said to belong to the aboriginal type of the red Indian race. As the discovery in question had not been made when I saw the excavation in progress at the gas works in 1846, I can not form an opinion as to the value of the chronological calculations which have led Dr. Dowler to ascribe to this skeleton an antiquity of 50,000 years."

ee

This case has always been regarded as an important one by the advocates of a high human antiquity. Who has not heard of this skeleton, under the four buried forests"! And yet how very uncertain the data! Mr. Lyell gives them at second or third hand, and admits that he can not judge of the evidence adduced as to the great age of this fossil. In his " Second Visit to the United States" (vol. ii. p. 191), he describes the growth of the cypress swamp, and quotes from a writer in Silliman's Journal (Sec. series, vol. v. p. 17), as follows: "Sections of such filled-up cypress basins, exposed by the changes in the position of the river, exhibit undisturbed, perfect, and erect stumps, in a series of every elevation with respect to each other, extending from

* Geological Evidence, pp. 43, 44.