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Ferry has based his calculations upon a single section, while those of M. Arcelin represent the mean taken from 33 points. The latter has, however, afterwards had recourse to the method of M. Forel, and to the rule of false position. But instead of seeking a maximum, he has endeavoured to determine a minimum. This calculation gives the following results :

Age of Roman layer

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1,500 years Age of Neolithic layer. Age of Bronze layer 2,250 years Age of Quaternary clay

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3,000 years 6,750 years

This represents a very moderate antiquity, and corresponds almost entirely with the dates of Manetho. But the minimum of M. Arcelin appears to me to be too low, and the error greater than in the case of the maximum of M. Forel. I shall only point out the most important of the causes which have led to this result. The calculations of the author are based upon the hypothesis of the equality of the floods, and of the alluvial deposit in the period between the present and the Roman period, and in times previous to that. He thus confounds the epochs when the basin of the Saône was left to Nature alone, with other epochs when the same basin was stripped of its forests, cleared and cultivated as it is at present. Now everyone knows how much more powerful the action of atmospheric agents, of rain in particular, are upon cultivated land than upon uncultivated. The upper layers, which served as the basis for the calculations of M. Arcelin, have necessarily diminished to a considerable extent the final result, since they must have been formed much more rapidly than a great part of the lower layers.

I shall say, then, of the minimum of M. Arcelin what I have said of the maximum of M. Forel. It leaves us the certainty that the present geological period goes back much further than 7-8000 years.

VI. What corrections ought the extreme numbers which I have just quoted to undergo in order to approximate to the truth? It is still impossible to say. But the path which should be followed in order to diminish the space

which separates them is henceforth clear.

The alluvium of

the Saône has always appeared to me to present conditions of uncertainty which it would be difficult to overcome, and the best means of determining the age of the present period by prehistoric chronology, appears to me to be the Lake of Geneva.

In order to correct the first results obtained by M. Forel, it would be necessary to take into account all the circumstances pointed out above, and several others also. It would be especially necessary, at different seasons of the year, in dry and wet weather, to gauge the smallest rivulets and ravines all round the lake, to measure the amount of mud their waters contain, and the amount of gravel and sand they carry down with it. This task is beyond the power of a single man; it would require the formation of an Association for this end. The problem would be worth the trouble, and the Swiss savants, so justly proud of their beautiful lake, might easily make arrangements to obtain its solution.

Such as they are, the works of MM. Arcelin and Forel lead to some important conclusions. The total age of our globe, used till lately to be restricted to a little more than 6,000 years; the alluvial deposits of the Saône show that the present geological epoch alone surpasses this by several centuries. On the other hand, under the influence of Darwinian prejudices, men have begun to handle time with a strange laxity, and it has been affirmed that millions of years separate us from glacial times. The deposits of silt in the Lake of Geneva show that these times terminated less than 100,000 years ago. As M. Forel well says, "This does not yet constitute historic chronology; it is, nevertheless, a little more than simple geological chronology;" and we see once more experience and observation doing justice to theoretical conceptions.

CHAPTER XIII.

AGE OF THE HUMAN SPECIES.-PAST GEOLOGICAL EPOCHS.

I. THE skovmoses and the remains at Schussenried have shown that man existed in Europe at the close of the Glacial Epoch. But did he live through this epoch? Did he precede it? Has he, therefore, been contemporary with vegetable and animal species, which have long been considered as fossils? We know that we can with certainty reply in the affirmative to these questions. We know also that the proof of this great fact, one of the grandest scientific conquests of modern times, dates, so to speak, from yesterday.

This demonstration rests on proofs which are now so well known that the enumeration of them will be sufficient. It is evident that human bones, buried beneath an undisturbed layer of soil, prove the existence of man at the time when the layer was formed. It is no less clear that flints worked by human hands and made into hatchets, knives, etc., bones of animals made into harpoons and arrow-heads, are so many irrefutable testimonies of the existence of the workers. Lastly, when human bones are found associated with bones of animals in the same undisturbed layers, it is again evident that man and these animal species have been contem. poraneous.

Many facts included in these three categories were proved in the earlier years, and during the course of the last century. Since 1700, excavations made by the order of Duke Eberhard Louis de Wurtemberg, at Canstadt, near Stuttgard, brought to light a great number of bones of animals, among which was found a human cranium. The nature of this precious relic

was, however, only recognised by Jaeger in 1835. About the same time an Englishman, Kemp, found in London itself, side by side with the teeth of elephants, a stone hatchet similar to those of Saint Acheul. Some time after Esper in Germany, and John Frere in England, discovered more or less analogous facts. But none of them were able to recognise their significance, for geology was quite in its infancy, and palæontology not yet in existence.

II. It was not till 1823 that Amy Boué gave Cuvier some human bones which he had found in the loess of the Rhine, near Lahr, in the Duchy of Baden. Boué regarded these bones as fossils. Cuvier refused to admit this conclusion. He has often been reproached with this, but the reproach is unjust. Cuvier had too often seen pretended fossil men change either into mastodons or salamanders, or even into simple contorted blocks of sandstone, not to be on his guard, and, in presence of a fact hitherto unique, he thought it wiser to admit a disturbance which would have carried into the loess bones of much later date than that of the formation of this layer.

But Cuvier, whatever may have been said of him, never denied the possibility of the discovery of fossil men. He has, on the contrary, formally admitted the existence of our species as anterior to the latest revolutions of the globe. "Man," he says, "may have inhabited some country of small extent from which he repeopled the earth after these terrible events." We see that the praises and reproaches which have been addressed to our great naturalist on account of an opinion which he never held, are equally undeserved.

The reserve, perhaps exaggerated, which Cuvier imposed upon himself, and the confidence which was placed in him, weighed heavily upon science by impeding the comprehension of the value of observations made by Tournal (18281829) in L'Aude, by Christol (1829) in Le Gard; by Schmerling (1833) in Belgium; by Joly (1835) in Lozère; by Marcel de Serres (1839), in L'Aude, and by Lund (1844) in

Brazil. In 1845 almost all the savants, properly so called, shared the opinion so well stated by Desnoyers. Without regarding the existence of fossil mau as impossible, they did not think that the discovery had as yet been made.

It is to the persevering efforts of a distinguished archeologist, Boucher de Perthes, that we owe the proof of a fact so long denied, and now universally admitted. Under the influence of certain philosophical ideas, little calculated to procure him followers, he had admitted d priori the existence of human beings anterior to the present man, from whom they must have differed considerably. He hoped to find either their remains themselves, or the products of their industry, in the upper alluvial deposits. Watching either himself or through his agents the excavation of the gravel pits near Abbeville, he collected there a number of flints, more or less rudely worked, but bearing the unmistakable impress of the hand of man. Some of his publications (1847) brought him visitors, who in their turn carried on the search. Soon after, M. Regollot (1855) and M. Gaudry (1856) obtained from the gravel of Saint Acheul hatchets similar to those of Abbeville, and declared themselves convinced. The English savants, Falconer, Prestwich, and Lyell, after having visited the collection of Boucher de Perthes, did the same, and had many imitators.

III. In spite of the discoveries which were multiplied in caverns and gravel-pits, even in the neighbourhood of Paris, the same objections were brought against the believers in fossil man which Cuvier had opposed to Amy Boué. The juxtaposition of the remains of extinct animals and human bones, or articles of human workmanship, were attributed to a reformation effected by water. The high authority of M. de Bramont lent new force to this argument. He compared the alluvium of the neighbourhood of Abbeville to his terrains des pentes, formed, he said, by storms of an exceptional violence, which only happened once in a thousand years, and which heap up together materials derived from different beds. As for the objects discovered in caverns they

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