The Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 | Page 7

may be determinative in its very nature, and admit of scepticism only at the expense of rationality. A single human grave, with its entombed skeleton, discovered in some uninhabited waste, where it was never known the foot of man had trod, would prove conclusively that human footsteps had once trod there. The discovery of a single weapon of the quality and temper of the Damascus blade amid the ruins of a buried city, would prove as fully as would the discovery of a thousand that the people of that age of the world understood the methods of working steel. One canoe found moored to the bank of the Delaware, the Schuylkill, or the Susquehanna, when the white man began to penetrate this continent, would have been sufficient to prove that the aborigines understood, to that extent, the art of navigation. So in science, one fossil of a different species from any found heretofore in a certain deposit is sufficient to add another to the forms of life represented by that deposit. One fossil found lower in the geological scale than life was supposed to have begun on this planet, is sufficient to prove that it had a still earlier beginning. So with regard to contemporary forms of life, one fact may be sufficient to warrant or compel a conclusion. Hugh Miller cites the instance of fossil dung being found as proving to the anti-geologists that these fossils were once real living creatures, and not mere freaks of nature. The instance might not be thought conclusive, for if the Author of nature saw fit to amuse himself by making the semblances of huge iguanodons, elephants, and hippopotami, in the solid rocks, it might readily be supposed that He would extend His amusement to the making of fossil dung.[2] But now, if in the fossil entrails of the cave hyena the bones of a hare should be found, it would prove conclusively to any but an anti-geologist, that the hare lived contemporaneously with the hyena.
These remarks are not thrown in by way of apology for the paucity of facts adduced by Sir Charles Lyell to prove the antiquity of man, but merely to illustrate the force which it is possible, in certain circumstances, for a single fact to have. Thus, for instance, the Scotch fir is not now, nor ever has been in historic times, a native of the Danish isles, yet it has been indigenous there in the human period, for Steenstrup has taken out with his own hands a flint implement from beneath one the buried trunks of that species in the Danish peat bogs. Again, if an implement of human workmanship is found in close proximity to the leg of a bear, or the horn of a reindeer, of extinct species, in an ancient cavern, and all covered by a floor of stalagmite, we see not how the conclusion is to be avoided that they were introduced into the cave before the stalagmite was formed; and in that case the inference that they were contemporaneous, or nearly so, may well be left to take care of itself. The attempt has been made to treat with levity the whole subject of the antiquity of man because of the numerical meagreness of the facts adduced in support of it. But as to this, it need only be observed that as a new theme for investigation, its facts must necessarily be meagre, as must be the facts of any science in its inchoate condition, and that they are steadily growing in volume, so that it is not safe to venture a final verdict against it on that score. The facts in support of the globular form of the earth, or the Copernican theory of the heavens, or the great age of the earth, were at one time meagre--they are not so now. Sir Charles Lyell is a pioneer explorer in a new and mysterious realm: the time may come when, amid the abundance of the treasure gathered from it, the scanty hoard which he opens to his reader may seem meagre enough.
Nevertheless, Sir Charles Lyell is fully a believer in the doctrine of the high antiquity of man. His book is not merely a debating-club discussion of the pros and cons, the probabilities for and against the doctrine, but rather the earnest pleading of the advocate fully persuaded that the truth is on his side. Not that it displays any forensic heat;--it is calm, cautious, dispassionate; but it has the air of one governed by conviction, and he often assumes the entire truth of his conclusions with the quiet nonchalance of a man seemingly unconscious that what he regards as matters of established certainty will be viewed by the great majority of his fellow beings as startling novelties.
The main stream of the