POPULAR SCIENCE

MONTHLY.

JULY, 1890.

NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. IX. THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHEOLOGY.

WE

BY ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D., L. H. D.,

EX-PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

HILE the view of chronology based upon the literal acceptance of Scripture texts was thus shaken by researches in Egypt, another line of observation and thought was slowly developed, even more fatal to the theological view.

From a very early period there had been dug from the earth, in various parts of the world, strangely shaped masses of stone, some rudely chipped, some polished; in ancient times these were generally considered as thunderbolts, and known as "thunderstones." This idea was carried into the middle ages, and we find in the eleventh century an emperor of the East sending to the Emperor Henry IV, of Germany, a "heaven axe"; and, in the twelfth century, a Bishop of Rennes asserting the value of thunder-stones as a divinely appointed means of securing success in battle, safety on the sea, security against thunder, and immunity from unpleasant dreams: even as late as the seventeenth century a French ambassador brought a stone hatchet, which still exists in the museum at Nancy, as a present to the Prince-Bishop of Verdun, and claimed for it health-giving virtues.

Yet, as early as the latter part of the sixteenth century, Michael Mercati tried to prove that the "thunder-stones" were weapons or implements of early races of men, though from some cause his book was not published until the following century, when other thinking men had begun to take up the same idea.

But early in the eighteenth century a fact of great importance was quietly established: in the year 1715 a large pointed weapon of black flint was found in contact with the bones of an elephant,

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in a gravel-bed near Gray's Inn Lane, in London. The world in general paid no heed to this; if the attention of theologians was called to it, they dismissed it summarily with a reference to the Deluge of Noah; but the specimen was labeled, the circumstances regarding it were recorded, and both specimen and record carefully preserved.

In 1723 Jussieu addressed the French Academy on The Origin and Uses of Thunder-stones. He showed that recent travelers from various parts of the world had brought a number of weapons and other implements of stone to France, and that they were essentially similar to what in Europe had been known as "thunderstones" a year later this fact was clinched into the scientific mind of France by the Jesuit Lafitau, who published a work showing the similarity between the customs of aborigines then existing in other lands and those of the early inhabitants of Europe. So began, in these works of Jussieu and Lafitau, the science of comparative ethnography.

In 1730 Mahudel presented a paper to the French Academy of Inscriptions on the so-called "thunder-stones," and also presented a series of plates which showed that these were stone implements, which must have been used at an early period in human history.

In 1778 Buffon, in his Époques de la Nature, intimated his belief that "thunder-stones" were made by early races of men; but he did not press this view, and the reason for his reserve was obvious enough: he had already one quarrel with the theologians on his hands, which had cost him dear-public retraction and humiliation; his declaration, therefore, attracted little notice.

In the year 1800 another fact came into the minds of thinking men in England. In that year John Frere presented to the London Society of Antiquaries sundry flint implements found in the clay-beds near Hoxne; that they were of human make was certain, and, in view of the undisturbed depths in which they were found, the theory was suggested that the men who made them must have lived at a very ancient geological epoch; yet even this discovery and theory passed like a troublesome dream, and soon seemed to be forgotten.

About twenty years later Dr. Buckland published a discussion of the subject, in the light of various discoveries in the drift and in caves. It received wide attention, but theology was hushed to silence by his soothing concession that these striking relics of human handiwork, associated with the remains of various extinct animals, were proofs of the Deluge of Noah.

In 1823 Boué, of the Vienna Academy of Sciences, showed to Cuvier sundry human bones found deep in the alluvial deposits of the upper Rhine, and suggested that they were of an early geological period; this Cuvier virtually, if not explicitly, denied:

great as he was in his own field, he was not a great geologist; he, in fact, led geology astray for many years. Moreover, he lived in a time of reaction; it was the period of the restored Bourbons-of the Voltairean King Louis XVIII, governing to please orthodoxy. Boué's discovery was, therefore, at first opposed, then enveloped in studied silence.

Cuvier evidently thought, as Voltaire had felt under similar circumstances, that "among wolves one must howl a little"; and his leading disciple, Élie de Beaumont, who succeeded him in the sway over geological science in France, was even more opposed to the new view than his great master had been. Boué's discoveries were, accordingly, apparently laid to rest forever.*

In 1825 Kent's Cavern, near Torquay, was explored by the Rev. Mr. McEnery, a Roman Catholic clergyman, who seems to have been completely overawed by orthodox opinion in England and elsewhere; for, though he found human bones and implements mingled with remains of extinct animals, he kept his notes in manuscript, and they were only brought to light more than thirty years later by Mr. Vivian.

The coming of Charles X, the last of the French Bourbons, to the throne, made the orthodox pressure even greater. It was the culmination of the reactionary period-the time in France when a clerical committee, sitting at the Tuileries, took such measures as were necessary to hold in check all science that was not perfectly "safe"; the time in Austria when Kaiser Franz made his famous declaration to sundry professors, that what he wanted of them was simply to train obedient subjects, and that those who did not make this their purpose would be dismissed; the time in Germany when Nicholas of Russia and the princelings and ministers under his control, from the King of Prussia downward, put forth all their might in behalf of "scriptural science"; the time in Italy when a scientific investigator, arriving at any conclusion distrusted by the Church, was sure of losing his place and in danger of losing his liberty; the time in England when what little science was taught was held in due submission to Archdeacon Paley's doctrines and the Thirty-nine Articles; the time in the United States when the first thing essential in science was, that it be adjusted to the ideas of revival preachers.

Yet men devoted to scientific truth labored on; and in 1828

* For the general history of early views regarding stone implements, see the first chapters in Cartailhac, La France Préhistorique; also Joly, L'Homme avant les Métaux; also Lyell, Lubbock, and Evans. For lightning-stones in China, see citation from a Chinese encyclopædia of 1662, in Tylor, Early History of Mankind, p. 209. On the universality of this belief on the surviving use of stone implements even into civilized times, and on their manufacture to-day, see ibid., chapter viii. For the treatment of Boué's discovery, see especially Mortillet, Le Préhistorique, Paris, 1885, p. 11.

Tournal, of Narbonne, discovered in the cavern of Bize specimens of human industry, with a fragment of a human skeleton, among bones of extinct animals. In the following year Christol published accounts of his excavations in the caverns of Gard; he had found in position, and under conditions which forbade the idea of after-disturbance, human remains mixed with bones of the extinct hyena of the early Quaternary period. Little general notice was taken of this, for the reactionary orthodox atmosphere involved such discoveries in darkness.

But in the French Revolution of 1830 the old politico-theological system collapsed: Charles X and his advisers fled for their lives; the other continental monarchs got glimpses of new light; the priesthood in charge of education were put on their good behavior for a time, and a better era began.

Under the constitutional monarchy of the house of Orleans in France and Belgium less attention was therefore paid by Government to the saving of souls; and we have in rapid succession new discoveries of remains of human industry, and even of human skeletons so mingled with bones of extinct animals as to give additional proofs that the origin of man was at a period vastly earlier than any which theologians had dreamed of.

A few years later the reactionary clerical influence against science in this field rallied again. Schmerling in 1833 explored a multitude of caverns in Belgium, especially at Engis and Engihoul, and found human skulls and bones closely associated with bones of extinct animals, such as the cave bear, hyena, elephant, and rhinoceros, while mingled with these were evidences of human workmanship in the shape of chipped flint implements; discoveries of a similar sort were made by De Serres in France and Lund in Brazil; but, at least as far as continental Europe was concerned, these discoveries were received with much coolness, both by Catholic leaders of opinion in France and Belgium, and by Protestant leaders in England and Holland. Schmerling himself appears to have been overawed, and gave forth a sort of apologetic theory, half scientific, half theologic, vainly hoping to satisfy the clerical side.

Nor was it much better in England. Sir Charles Lyell, so devoted a servant of prehistoric research thirty years later, was still holding out against it on the scientific side; and, as to the theological side, it was the period when that great churchman, Dean Cockburn, was insulting geologists from the pulpit of York Minster, and the Rev. Mellor Brown denouncing geology as " a black art," "a forbidden province"; and when in America Prof. Moses Stuart and others like him were belittling the work of Benjamin Silliman and Edward Hitchcock.

In 1840 Godwin Austin presented to the Royal Geological So

ciety an account of his discoveries in Kent's Cavern near Torquay, and especially of human bones and implements mingled with bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, cave bear, hyena, and other extinct animals; yet this memoir, like that of McEnery fifteen years before, found an atmosphere so unfavorable that it was not published.

But just at the middle of the nineteenth century came the beginning of a new epoch in science-an epoch when all these earlier discoveries were to be interpreted by means of investigations in a different field: for, in 1847, a man previously unknown to the world at large, Boucher de Perthes, published at Paris the first volume of his work on Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, and in this he showed engravings of typical flint implements and weapons, of which he had discovered thousands upon thousands in the high drift beds near Abbeville in northern France.

The significance of this discovery was great indeed-far greater than Boucher himself at first supposed. The very title of his book showed that he at first regarded these implements and weapons as having belonged to men overwhelmed at the Deluge of Noah; but it was soon seen that they were something very different from proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis: for they were found in terraces at great heights above the river Somme, and, under any possible theory having regard to the truth, must have been deposited there at a time when the river system of northern France was vastly different from anything known in the historic period. The whole discovery indicated a series of great geological changes since the time when these implements were made, requiring cycles of time compared to which the space allowed by the orthodox chronologists were as nothing.

His work was the result of over ten years of research and thought. Year after year a force of men under his direction had dug into these high-terraced gravel deposits of the river Somme, and in his book he now gave, in the first full form, the results of his labor. So far as France was concerned, he was met at first by what he calls "a conspiracy of silence," and by a contemptuous opposition among orthodox scientists, at the head of whom stood. Élie de Beaumont.

This heavy, sluggish opposition seemed immovable: nothing that Boucher could do or say appeared to lighten the pressure of the orthodox theological opinion behind it-not even his belief that these fossils were remains of men drowned at the Deluge of Noah, and that they were proofs of the literal exactness of Genesis seemed to help the matter. His opponents felt instinctively that such discoveries boded danger to the accepted view, and they were right: Boucher himself soon saw the folly of trying to account for them by the orthodox theory which he had adopted at first.