gradually raised in character and style of mind by the pressure of circumstances and natural selection under which a first-class pair of apes begat the lowest possible pair of approximate human beings.

The subject of man's antiquity is not touched on in this volume; but his speech is a necessary part of the subject, considered in relation to man's origin and endowments. With such philosophers as those just mentioned the only way of accounting for the existence of language is that of supposing the earliest family of paulo-post anthropoids to have acquired a small advance upon the best apes in their voice-organs and fineness of ear, as well as in corresponding development of brain, so that they could not help chattering and imitating the sounds of things about them, until they learned to associate those sounds with ideas of the things themselves.

They were beginning to have rational ideas, and as the ideas would sometimes recur when the objects associated with them were not present they uttered the sounds representing the ideas, and thus, by degrees, formed a language with an inherent grammar. Thus different modifications of a roar would serve to indicate the nearness or distance of a supposed lion, with signs, also, of the temper it might be in. Hence, speech on the principles of pure onomatopoeia. As such semisimian beings are presumed to have always possessed a disposition to improve their advantages from generation to generation, they not only extended their language with the extending range of their minds, but

they at length became manufacturers likewise. There must have been full time for the purpose in the many hundreds of thousands of years intervening between the first transition of ape manwards, to man himself, as we find him. The makers of the flint implements, for instance, as some say, had, probably, a slight vocabulary, and could voluntarily suggest ideas to each other by sounds almost articulate. Some philosophers, however, suppose that the flint-implement manufacturers were so low in intellect that it is quite a question whether they had any language. Sir C. Lyell, from his ideas of geological data, computes that 150,000 years passed without any improvement in the 'make' of their weapons, which could scarcely have been the case, one would think, had they enjoyed the benefit of being able to talk the matter over together after the manner of other social reformers.

*

The inference as to the required time is drawn from the remarkable circumstance that the flint implements in the drift on the slope of the lowest bed of the Somme are precisely of the same character as those found in the slope of the supposed highest level. This fact may well induce us to suspect that the opinion of M. Elie de Beaumont, the eminent and veteran geologist of France, is correct, namely, that the gravelly drift referred to is not, as Sir Charles Lyell supposes, of the quaternary or diluvial age, but really a member of the terrains meubles, that is, of the actual or modern

* See Lyell's Antiquity of Man.

period.* This opinion, at least, throws a new element of doubt on Sir Charles's inference, which is founded on a theory that requires us to believe many things not proved to be true.

Perhaps the manufacturers aforesaid invented flint implements only to destroy one another, according to the custom of savages. But, unfortunately, craniologists have not been able to discover any authentic skulls of this very ancient stock of an extinct European family. Possibly they not only warred with wild beasts, but, worse than wild beasts themselves, they ate one another, bones and all. This would account for the scarcity of their osseous remains in a fossil state, along with their flint hatchets. We do not even find the required traces of phosphate of lime in the soil with flint hatchets, and the slight appearance of this material in soils in general is, by the by, a fact rather opposed to the immense antiquity of man. The state of the earth invalidates the notion that it has been inhabited by mankind for incalculable ages. Men ought certainly to have left the earthy matter of their bones behind them; and, moreover, one would imagine that a race that could fix a flint in a cleft stick and hollow out canoes with fire and flint tools, would also have been able to fashion pots and pans of clay, and burn them into hard stoneware. But if they had done so, though they dwelt in France only 50,000 years, as the advocates of the high antiquity of man think they

* Athenæum, May 23, 1863.

must have done, on the shortest computation, they would have filled the land with potsherds, if with no other evidence of their existence and their handiworks; and if they had not made any advancement in the manufacture of tools and weapons, some other tribe was likely to have done so, and have wiped them out of their 'location' in something less than 50,000 years.

It would be rather a startling argument for the fixity of races if the present eloquent inhabitants of France sprang from such low-minded nearly mute ancestors. No; we are not for a moment to infer that any Europeans now existing could be derived from such a low set of Europeans before them. What became of them and their offspring, however, we are not informed; but such a half-human race, that could at best only howl instead of speaking, were, of course, neither of Aryan nor Semitic connection; for are we not told by received authorities that none but Aryans and Semitics were ever sufficiently developed in brain to originate and diffuse civilising ideas and words in Asia or Europe? These flint-imple

It has been inferred that the civilisation of Egypt had preceded any received chronology by at least 10,000 years (see Bunsen and Lyell). The evidence was supposed to be found in remains of burnt bricks and earthenware, a few fragments of which were presented to Mr. Horner, as if the diggers had discovered them, from twenty to thirty feet below the present surface of the soil deposited by the Nile. If, however, Egyptian civilisation had been of such a date, instead of a few doubtful fragments being found, such remains ought to have been found in immense abundance, as they are found where man has been known to have long dwelt, in Babylonia for instance. But unfortunately, as Mr. Sharpe shows, Mr. Horner found Roman brick, if any, at the aforesaid depths, and founded his inference of Egyptian antiquity upon that!

ment makers could, of course, have had skulls no better than next of kin in mould to the worst Australian natives, or some tribe of Africans yet to be discovered as the profane link between negroes and gorillas, and so they were swept clean out of creation, not even leaving a trace or a dint of one of their skulls behind them.

Believers in the low savage first man, nearly languageless and idealess, and also believers in the gorilla origin of mankind, are rather hard upon those who believe that man was created man with speech soon superadded. They expect us to take their word for it that the lowest possible savages did by degrees exalt themselves into the highest style of man, and yet that the Aryan and Semitic races had no original relation to the rest of mankind. This is very severe logic. Are we capable of understanding it? Or must we receive it whether we understand it or not? We are also told we all sprung from brutes, and yet we are not to listen to testimony which asserts that the highest style of man may by force of growing ignorance, wickedness, wandering, and wretchedness, through succeeding generations, be degraded at length to the lowest place in the scale of humanity, even losing, like idiots, all trace of religious and mental enlightenment and retaining only such language as corresponds with their degradation. Yet there is no race on earth which does not prove, by the possession of remnants of language and of art, that their ancestors at one time stood in closer connection with some centre of comparative civilisation, just as some of