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 Liege; 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 archaeologist. 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 palaeontological, 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 Moeen, 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 Maerjalen 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.