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

no escaping the conclusion which it forces
upon the mind. It may concentrate in itself all the elements of certainty
usually obtained from many sources. It 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