Chapter 10 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Though many men on reaching their sixty-third year are content to rest upon their oars and not to attempt new ventures, Lyell had plunged into a question which was arousing almost as much excitement as the origin of species-namely, the antiquity of man. It was a question, indeed, which for a long time must have been before his mind-witness his remarks on Dr.

Schmerling's work in the caves near Liége; but it had assumed a special significance owing to the famous discovery of flint implements in the valley of the Somme.[133] The whole subject also would have a special interest for Lyell, because he had made Tertiary deposits his special field in stratigraphy, and had worked at this subject downwards, comparing extinct with living forms, so that he had seen more than others of the borderland which blends by an insensible transition the province of the geologist with that of the arch?ologist. Probably also the thought which he had been giving to the question of the origin of species would bring into no less vivid prominence that of the age and origin of the human race. Be this as it may, he undertook a task comparatively novel, and for the next three years was fully occupied in the preparation of his third great book, "The Antiquity of Man." Travel was necessary for this purpose also; but as the journeys were less lengthy than those already described, and led him for the most part over old ground, it is needless to enter into details. He visited the gravels of the Somme Valley and the caves on the Meuse, besides other parts of Northern France and Belgium,[134] the gravel pits near Bedford, and various localities in England, examining into the evidence for himself, and paying particular attention, not only to the question of man's antiquity, but also to the supposed return of a warmer climate than now prevails after the era of glacial cold. The book was published early in 1863. Naturally its conclusions were startling to many and were vigourously denounced by some; but it was a great success, for it ran through three editions in the course of the year. A fourth and enlarged edition was published in 1873.

The book may seem, from the literary critic's point of view, rather composite in character, and this objection was made in a good-natured form by a writer in the Saturday Review,[135] who called it "a trilogy on the antiquity of man, ice, and Darwin." That, however, is but a slight blemish, if blemish it be, and it was readily pardoned, because of the general interest of the book, the clearness of its style, and the lucidity of its reasoning.

In accordance with his usual plan of work-proceeding tentatively from the known to the unknown-Lyell begins with times nearest to the present era and facts of which the interpretation is least open to dispute. He conducts his reader at the outset to the peat mosses of Denmark, where weapons of iron, bronze, and stone lie in a kind of stratified order; and to those mounds of shells, the refuse heaps of a rude people, which are found on the Baltic shore. Next he places him on the site of the pile-built villages which once fringed the shores of Swiss and Italian lakes. Here weapons of iron, of bronze, and of stone are hidden in peat or scattered on the lake-bed. But these log-built settlements, such as those which Herodotus described at Lake Prasias in Roumelia, are not the only remnants of an almost prehistoric people, for nearer home we find analogous constructions in the crannoges of Ireland-islets partly artificial, built of timber and stone. Lyell then passes on from Europe to the valleys of the Nile and Mississippi, and so to the "carses" of Scotland. In the last case canoes buried in the alluvial deposits, as in the lowland by the Clyde, indicate that some physical changes, slight though they may be, have occurred since the coming of man. But none of these researches lead us back into a very remote past; they keep us still lingering, as it were, on the threshold of history. The weapons which have been described, even if made of stone, exhibit a considerable amount of mechanical skill, for many of them are fashioned and polished with much care, while they are associated with the remains of creatures which are still living at no great distance, if not in the immediate vicinity. Accordingly he conducts his reader, in the next place, to the localities where ruder weapons only have been found, fashioned by chipping, and never polished-namely, to the caves of Belgium and of Britain, of Central and of Southern France, and to the gravel beds in the valleys of the Somme and the Seine, of the Ouse and other rivers of Eastern and Southern England. These furnish abundant evidence that man was contemporary with several extinct animals, such as the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, or with others which now inhabit only arctic regions, such as the reindeer and the musksheep, and that the valleys since then have been deepened and altered in contour. This evidence, stratigraphical as well as pal?ontological, proves that important changes have occurred since man first appeared, not only in climate, but also in physical geography.

The Glacial Epoch is the subject of the second part of the book. Its pages contain an admirable sketch of the deposits assigned to that age in Eastern England, Scandinavia, the Alps, and North America, with special descriptions of the loess of Northern Europe, the drifts of the Danish island of M?en, so like those near Cromer, and the parallel roads of Glenroy, which Lyell now supposes to have been formed in a manner similar to that of the little terrace by the M?rjalen See.

The third part deals with "the origin of species as bearing on man's place in Nature." It is a recantation of the views which he had formerly maintained. In all his earlier writings, including the ninth edition of the "Principles," he had expressed himself dissatisfied with the hypothesis of the transmutation of species, and had accepted, though cautiously and not without allowing for considerable power of variation, that of specific centres of creation. Now, after a full review of the question, he gives his reasons for abandoning his earlier opinions and adopting in the main those advocated by Darwin and Wallace. Nevertheless, through frankly avowing his change of view, he advances cautiously and tentatively, like a man over treacherous ice-so cautiously, indeed, that Darwin is not wholly satisfied with his convert, and chides him good-humouredly for his slow progress and over-much hesitation. But this very hesitation was as real as the conversion: the one was the outcome of Lyell's thoroughly judicial habit of mind, the other was a proof, perhaps the strongest that could be given, of that mind's freshness, vigour, and candour. The book ends with a chapter on "man's place in Nature." On this burning question the author speaks with great caution, but comes to the conclusion that man, so far as his bodily frame is concerned, cannot claim exception from the law which governs the rest of the animal kingdom and he ends[136] with a few words on the theological aspect of the question: "It may be said that, so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth, at successive geological periods, of life-sensation-instinct-the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason-and, lastly, the improvable reason of man himself, presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter."

FOOTNOTES:

[133] Found by M. Boucher de Perthes, who had published a book on the subject in 1847, and had announced the discovery about seven years earlier; but geologists, for various reasons, were not fully satisfied on the matter till the visit of Messrs. Prestwich and John Evans (now Sir) in 1857.

[134] He went to Florence in 1862, but how far this was for geological work is not stated.

[135] Vol. xv. p. 311.

[136] "Antiquity of Man," chap. xxiv.

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