by Xerxes against Greece, Herodotus mentions not only tribes whose breasts were protected with scale armour, and those who had helmets of brass, and such as had scimitars, long and short iron spears, &c., but those also who, as the Asiatic Ethiopians, "were clothed in panthers' and lions' skins, who carried arrows of cane, tipped with stone instead of iron-stone," he says, "of that sort on which they engrave seals". species of quartz, the very same as that from which many of the British arrow-heads of the so-called Stone Period were made.

Researches into the remains of the Stone Period, conducted by some of those who have complete faith in this classification, have gradually thrown back the history of primeval man to a date hitherto undreamed of in history, either sacred or profane. It is true that years are not named; but such expressions as ages before the first page of history was written," "thousands of years before we have traces of man from any other quarter,' ," "immense antiquity, to which the foundation of Nineveh is but as yesterday," and the like, show what impressions are looming in the mists. Even many good people are suspicious of any attempts to bring such thoughts fully into the light. They have a certain ill-defined dread that, after all, they may turn out too true!

Sir Charles Lyell's recent work, "The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man," gives a prominence and importance to this question which biblical scholars must consider. The work is not characterized by the author's usual precision and order. It contains, however, a mass of information brought from many quarters, and it sets the whole subject fairly enough before readers. The remarks which follow were written before the publication of Sir Charles Lyell's volume, with most, I may say all, of the material before me referred to in it. On reconsidering the views urged here, in the light of Sir Charles Lyell's remarks, I have seen no reason to alter any of them.

The chief parts of the articles of this period used in domestic life, in the chase, and in war, were all made of stone, mainly flint, though different kinds of quartz, and one or two other minerals, were also used. These have been discovered-1st, In cromlechs, and in graves a few feet deep in earth, acknowledged by all to be surface and undisturbed; 2nd, In heaps of refuse at places near to which primeval man had sojourned for a period; 3rd, In the mud at the bottom of lakes in which pile habitations had been erected; and 4th, In superficial deposits whose formation and geological age are still matters of controversy.

We may pass by the first of these places of deposit, and glance at the second and third, with a view of giving a fuller notice of the fourth,

in connection with which the theory of the existence of a race of men before Adam has chiefly been raised.

2nd. Stone Articles discovered in Refuse-Heaps.-These heaps occur in Denmark. They have been made known to us by Professors Steenstrup, the zoologist, Forchhammer, the geologist, and Worsäe, the antiquary, as the kjökkenmöddings, or pre-historic "kitchen middens" of Denmark. These dust-heaps are all found near the sea. One farthest from the shore is only eight miles distant. They vary from three to ten feet deep, are sometimes three hundred yards long, and from one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet broad. They are made up of shells, flint implements, and the bones of animals. The shells are chiefly those of full-grown oysters (Ostrea edulis), cockles (Cardium edule), mussels (Mytilus edulis), and periwinkles (Littorina littorea). The flint instruments are mainly such as would be used by rude tribes in the chase and in war. The bones are those of the stag (Cervus elephas), the roedeer (C. capreolus), the wild bull (Bos urus), the wild boar (Sus scrofa); those of the dog (Canis familiaris), the wolf (C. lupus), the fox (C. vulpes), the wild cat (Felis catus), the lynx (F. lynx), and a few others not so common. Bones of several species of birds have also been identified, as the wild swan (Anas cygnus), the great auk (Alca impennis), and the capercailzie (Tetrao urogallus). No human bones have been discovered in these heaps.

The Danish archæologists conclude from these kjokkenmoddings that the people who formed them were savages, that they lived at a very remote period of the Stone Age, because the implements found in them are inferior to most of those obtained from tumuli belonging to a later stage of the same epoch, and that the presence of the bones of the capercailzie point to a time when Denmark was covered with pine forests. This last inference has been strongly put by Mr. J. Lubbock (Nat. Hist. Rev., Oct. 1861).

The first inference revives the old theory of the original savage state of man. Sir Charles Lyell puts this very broadly. Had," he says, "the original stock of mankind been really endowed with such superior intellectual powers, and with inspired knowledge, and had they possessed the same improvable nature as their posterity, the point of advancement which they would have reached ere this would have been immeasurably higher. higher. We cannot ascertain at present the limits, whether of the beginning or the end of the first stone period, when men co-existed with the extinct mammalia, but that it was of great duration we cannot doubt. During those ages there would have

VOL. I.

3 T

been time for progress of which we can scarcely form a conception, and very different would have been the character of the works of art which we should now be endeavouring to interpret-these relics which we are now disinterring from the old gravel-pits of St.-Acheul or from the Liége caves. In them, or in the upraised bed of the Mediterranean, on the south coast of Sardinia, instead of the rudest pottery or flint tools, so irregular in form as to cause the unpractised eye to doubt whether they afford unmistakable evidence of design, we should now be finding sculptured forms, surpassing in beauty the master-pieces of Phidias or Praxiteles; lines of buried railways or electric telegraphs from which the best engineers of our day might gain invaluable hints; astronomical instruments and microscopes of more advanced construction than any known in Europe, and other indications of perfection in the arts and sciences, such as the nineteenth century has not yet witnessed." Now, there were some force in these remarks if we could fit the natural history of man into the Darwinian theory. But every attempt at this has proved lame and impotent. The last attempt is no exception. Man's natural history continues an unfathomable mystery when the testimony of the Bible is refused. Each theorist, who tries to decide the whole question on independent scientific grounds, is doomed to pass off the stage, with the words following him which were once spoken of an eminent judge

แ

"Chief Justice Parker

Has made that darker

Which was dark enough before!"

We must take something else into account than man's "superior intellectual powers." The present condition of his moral nature must be considered. In this we will find how it is that he has not been yet 'developed up to a god." The history of every nation points to progress up to a certain point, and then to retrogression. Sin is the great disturber, and it acts in curious ways. Take Greece as an example. Learning, refinement, the triumphs of art, the fruits of a widely and highly cultivated imagination, bore testimony in the best days of that country to an advanced civilization. Had the development continued, what would it now have been? But this very civilization gave an indirect power to conscience which it could not have assumed among an ignorant people. They still desired more, even if it were only an "unknown god." To escape from their unrest they betook themselves to every kind of licentiousness; in a word, they cultivated those very

animal passions which were to rise and overmaster all intellectual attainments. The progress was to be stopped, and they were to be thrown back to the starting-point. Thus it has been with the world. There is an exception. Life in a Saviour gives permanence to progress. But few see this.

As regards the other inferences, which imply a belief in a very remote antiquity for these heaps, we notice

1. Their formation. Are they, after all, proved to be heaps formed by men who must have sojourned for many generations beside them? It is to be borne in mind, that until a comparatively recent period they were regarded as natural. Indeed, doubt exists even still as to one or two of them, which present rough layers of sand and gravel in their composition. Might not water action, in a shifting condition of a shore noted for its changes, have swept them into form, embedding the less useful instrument left by man near the sea, and the remains of mollusc, fish, beast, and bird, on which he had fed? Or if in every respect artificial, may they not have been formed in a far shorter time by multitudes of men than what is claimed for them on the supposition that the people were comparatively few, and that the gathering must have been the work of ages? Little positive stress is laid on these queries. They are put simply to show, that the ground is not so clear as some imagine for claiming antiquity for the kjökkenmöddings which would at least take us back to a period prior to that generally assigned to the deluge.

2. Their position. They stand on a coast universally acknowledged as not stationary. It is next to certain that the waves have rolled over one of them. This has been accounted for by the hypothesis, that the waves were once more powerful on that shore than they are now, and rolled their waters farther inland. But this hypothesis gives great uncertainty to the whole matter. Such abnormal action may have been of a comparatively recent date, and may have brought these remains of the past, found in surface earth, into curious relationships. But again, granting everything on this point which the advocates of a greatly protracted period for their formation demand, such heaps do not in reality determine anything with certainty touching the great antiquity of the tribes who fed chiefly on shellfish, and used weapons of flint. They do, however, tell a very plain tale of their isolation from that great centre, whence rolled those waves of population which went to replenish the whole earth. Had, for example, the mutineers of the Bounty, in 1789, been obliged to take to a boat, and been driven on Pitcairn Island

without any modern implements, they would have been forced to form the compact lava of the island into articles for use. It was quite within the range of probability, that, after a few years, every man should have perished. Their bones might then have been laid among the shingle on the shore, and ultimately been swept into the ocean. The finders of their rude weapons would have reasoned absurdly, had they come to any conclusion as to the great antiquity of the men who had formed the weapons. All that the fact could have told would have been the story of isolation from centres of thought and civilization: nothing more. Indeed, our supposition was realized, though in a different way. When the mutineers landed on Pitcairn, they found stone hatchets, stone spear-heads, and even a large stone bowl, telling the tale of some little company who had been thus driven away from their native shores and left to perish on that island. This consideration should not be lost sight of. It has important bearings on several recent archæological generalizations.

3. Their animal remains. These all belong to species which are still found in Northern Europe, or to species which are known to have lived in the true recent historic period. Of those not now met with in the localities referred to, two may be noticed. The oyster has disappeared from that coast, but it is certainly known to have been far from rare within the last sixty years. The late Professor Fleming was among the last who described the great auk from observation. It is now generally believed to be extinct. The capercailzie is not at present met with in a wild state in Denmark. Now, I would be far from hinting, as has so often been done, that the association of these remains with stone instruments should, as in the case of those of the capercailzie, lead to the conclusion, that they perished with the introduction of the next period. I would rather reason thus:-If in half a century two forms of life at least have looked their last and ceased from among the living, in localities where they once abounded, we are not warranted to affirm a remote antiquity of these heaps, merely because we discover in them the remains of animals of whose presence in such localities we have no record within the period of written history. Suppose the great auk had become extinct before any systematist had given it a place in his pages, and that its bones came to be found in a heap, where rude instruments of stone were imbedded, would it have been wise to conclude that it ceased with the end of the stone period? Yet this is virtually the mode in which we are asked to give credit to most extraordinary inferences. Again, we are told the capercailzie feeds on the