is liable to the same class of misunderstandings against which Calvinism has had so constantly to contend. Are Christian apologists satisfied with moral evidences, and ready to rest their case on probabilities? Darwinians are often more than ready to accept similar evidence in natural history. Finally, a plan of development, in which there appears "first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear," is as manifest in human history as in natural history; and we may conclude that Darwinism has not improperly been styled the "Calvinistic interpretation of nature." Through philosophic study both of the systems of nature and of grace we come back at length to the central throne of God, from whose all-comprehensive ideas streams of creating and directing power flow across the gulf of time in continuous and orderly measure. Some further remarks which might properly come in here, are more in place in the chapter upon the Relation of the Bible to Science. Meanwhile we will give attention to some special phases in the collateral subject of the Antiquity and Early Condition of the Human Race. CHAPTER VI. AN ESSAY ON PREHISTORIC MAN. I. Geological Agencies of Preservation. MAN is by nature a vandal, and lives by devastation. One generation laboriously constructs the pyramids, later generations make stone-quarries of them. If the Caesars build upon the Tiber a city of marble, and enrich their palaces with the choicest works of art, their unworthy descendants will probably make lime-kilns of the halls, and turn the statuary of their fathers into ordinary mortar. For the purposes of history Vesuvius may be regarded as the guardian angel of Pompeii and Herculaneum. We should not speak of the destruction of those cities by a volcano. Many lives were indeed lost, and much property disappeared; but corrosive agencies would have accomplished those results in a few years, unaided by volcanic forces. What the burning mountain really did Iwas to throw in kindness a soft mantle of dust and ashes over the works of art in those cities, and then to spread a film of protecting lava over all, that little should be lost. After many cen 256 turies man finds the buried treasure, removes the covering, and lo! there stands before him, in realistic perfection, an ancient city as it existed in the height of Roman civilization. The eruption of Vesuvius was a geological agency. In this case we happen to know from historical documents the exact date of its occurrence. But in the absence of such documents we should know only the order of the events. The city existed before the eruption. That would be certain. Yet there might be no trustworthy indications as to how many years ago the city was destroyed. In 1851 the Royal Society of England instructed Mr. Leonard Horner to look in the alluvium of the Nile for works of art. This agent chose two points for investigations, one near Heliopolis and eight miles above the apex of the delta, where the intervale is about sixteen miles wide. In a line across the valley, from east to west, he sunk fiftyone wells to a depth of sixty feet. Almost everywhere, and from all depths- even sixty feet below the surface in the central parts of the valley — he found pieces of pottery and burnt brick. Farther up the valley, in the latitude of Memphis, where the intervale is only five miles broad, twentyseven wells were dug the same depth as those at Heliopolis, and with similar results. - In this case the pottery and the burnt brick are archaeological monuments preserved by the geological agencies of a river deposit. The river has deposited that sixty feet of mud since the pitcher was broken at the wheel. The order of the facts is established. But the question of determining how many years ago the river began to deposit mud over the brick is very complicated and difficult. It is not safe to accept any off-hand calculation upon this point. A great array of facts like the foregoing teach us that man has witnessed vast changes in the physical geography of the world. The interpretation of these facts is one of the most fascinating departments of modern science. II. Instability of the Earth Illustrated. The stability which we attribute to the "solid earth," and the immovability with which we invest the "everlasting hills" are altogether imaginary. The land is probably nowhere or ever completely at rest. There seems to be rest, because the lives of single generations are too short, and ordinary observation is too inaccurate to note the slow changes continually in progress. The coast of Greenland, as well as that of New Jersey, is slowly subsiding. That of Central and Northern Sweden is rising at a probable rate of from two to five feet in a century.1 1 Lyell's Antiquity of Man, pp. 48, 49. Scotland, too, has risen considerably since man first made his appearance there. Within the last century twenty canoes have been dug out of the old banks of the Clyde near Glasgow, five of them under the very streets of the city. These canoes were sunk, and covered by the silt of the river when either the land was thirty or forty feet lower than it is now, or the water was as much higher. In 1819, in the boggy soil through which the river Forth winds many miles inland from Edinburgh, the skeleton of a gigantic whale eighty-five feet long, with a perforated harpoon of deer's horn beside it, was disclosed a mile from the river, and seven miles from the sea. They were situated near Stirling, at the foot of the Ochil hills, twenty feet above the highest tide of the neighboring estuary. Over them an accumulation of five feet of alluvial soil was covered by a thin bed of moss. The pavement of a Roman causeway near by, leading to one of the fords of the Forth, showed that no important change had taken place in the bed of the river, or in the general features of the country during the era of authentic history.1 This is but a portion of the evidence that man once chased the whale in the forths of Scotland when, relatively to the land, the tide rose thirty or forty feet higher than now. Either the land has risen since that time, or the ocean has shrunk away. 1 Wilson's Prehistoric Man, Vol. i. p. 32. |