Human Origins

PART II. EVIDENCE FROM SCIENCE. Another circumstance which tells strongly against the historical character of Abraham is his connection with Lot, and the legend of Lot's wife. The history of this legend is a curious one. For many centuries, in fact down to quite modern times, the volcanic phenomena of the Dead Sea were appealed to as convincing confirmations of the account in Genesis of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrha, and hundreds of pious pilgrims saw, touched, and tasted the identical pillar of salt into which Lot's wife was changed. It is now certain that the volcanic eruptions were of an earlier geological age, and that the story of Lot's wife is owing to the disintegration of a stratum of salt marl, which weathers away under the action of wind and rain into columnar masses, like those described by Lyell in a similar formation in Catalonia. Innumerable travellers and pilgrims from early Christian times down to the seventeenth century returned from Palestine testifying that they had seen Lot's wife, and this was appealed to by theologians as a convincing proof of the truth of the Scripture narrative. Some saw her big, some little, some upright, and some prostrate, according to the state of disintegration of the pillars pointed out by the guides, which change their form rapidly under the influence of the weather, but no doubt was entertained as to the attestation of the miracle. It turns out, however, to be one of those geological myths of precisely the same nature as that which attributed the Devil's Dyke near Brighton to an arrested attempt of the Evil One to cut a trench through the South Downs, so as to let in the sea and drown the Weald. The episode of Lot and his daughters is also clearly a myth to account for the aversion of the Hebrews to races so closely akin to them as the Moabites and Ammonites, and it could hardly have originated until after the date of the Book of Ruth, which shows no trace of such a racial aversion. Many of the events recorded of Abraham's life, though not so wildly extravagant as those attributed to Noah, are still clearly unhistorical. That a woman getting on towards one hundred years old should be so beautiful that her husband passes her off for his sister, fearing that, if known to be his wife, the king would kill him in order to take her into his harem, does not seem to be very probable. But when precisely the same thing is said to have occurred twice over to the same man, once at the court of Pharaoh and again at that of Abimelech; and a third time to his son Isaac, at the same place, Gerar, and to the same king Abimelech, the improbability becomes impossibility, and the legend is obviously mythical. Nor is it very consistent with the character of the pious patriarch, the father of the chosen people, to have told such lies, and apparently connived at his wife's prostitution, so that he could save his own skin, and grow rich on the "sheep and oxen, asses, manservants, maidservants, and camels" given him by the king on the supposition that he was Sarah's brother. Nor can we take as authentic history, Abraham talking with the Lord, and holding a sort of Dutch auction with him, in which he beats down from fifty to ten the number of righteous men who, if found in Sodom, are to save it from destruction. On the whole, I do not see that there is anything in the account of Abraham and his times which we can safely assume to be historical, except the general fact that the Hebrews were descended from a Semitic family or clan, who migrated from the district of Ur in Lower Chaldæa probably about the time, and possibly in consequence, of the Elamite conquest, about 2200 b.c. , which set in motion so many wars, revolutions, and migrations in Western Asia. The chronology from Abraham to Moses is hopelessly confused. If Abraham is really an historical character, his synchronism with Chedorlaomer or Kudur-lagomer, the Elamite King of Chaldæa, must be admitted, which fixes his date at about 2200 b.c. Again, if the narrative of the Exodus is historical, it is generally agreed that it took place in the reign of Menepthah, or about 1320 b.c. The interval between Abraham and Moses therefore must have been about 900 years. But if we take the genealogies as authentic history, Jacob, in whose time the Hebrews went into Egypt, was Abraham's grandson, and Moses, under whom they left it, was the son of Jochebed, who was the granddaughter of Levi, the son of Jacob, who was a man advanced in life when he came to Egypt. The genealogies therefore do not allow of more than five generations, or, at a high average for each, about 200 years for this interval between Abraham and Moses. The tradition respecting this seems to have been already very confused when Genesis was compiled, for we find in chap. xv. vers. 15, 16, the Lord saying to Abraham, that his descendants shall come back to Palestine and possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates, "in the fourth generation" after Abraham had "gone to his fathers in peace, and been buried in a good old age"; while only one verse before it is said, "thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them for four hundred years." Even if 400 years were allowed for the sojourn of the Hebrews in Egypt, it would not extend the interval between Moses and Abraham to more than 500 years, or 400 years less than is required by the synchronism with Chedorlaomer. It is needless to say that neither in the fourth or in any other generation did the descendants of Abraham "possess the whole country from the river of Egypt to the river Euphrates." There is no period of Jewish history so obscure as that of the sojourn in Egypt. The long date is based entirely on the distinct statement in Genesis xii., that the sojourning of the children of Israel was 430 years, and other statements that it was 400 years, both of which are hopelessly inconsistent with the genealogies. Genealogies are perhaps more likely to be preserved accurately by oral tradition than dates and figures, which Oriental races generally deal with in a very arbitrary way. But there are serious difficulties in the way of accepting either date as historical. There is no mention of any specific event during the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt between their advent in the time of Joseph and the Exodus, except their oppression by a new king who knew not Joseph, and the building of the treasure cities, Pi-thom and Ramses, by their forced labour. The latter fact may be taken as probably true from the monuments discovered by Mr. Flinders Petrie; and if so, it occurred in the reign of Ramses II. But there is no other confirmation, from Egyptian records or monuments, of any of the events related in the Pentateuch, until we come to the passage quoted from Manetho by Josephus, which describes how the unclean people and lepers were oppressed; how they revolted under the leadership of a priest of Hieropolis, who changed his name from Osarphis to Moyses; how they fortified Avaris and called in help from the expelled Hyksos settled at Jerusalem; how the Egyptian king and his army retreated before them into Ethiopia without striking a blow; and the revolters ruled Egypt for thirteen years, killing the sacred animals and desecrating the temples; and how, at the end of this period, the king and his son returned with a great army, defeated the rebels and shepherds with great slaughter, and pursued them to the bounds of Syria. This account is evidently very different from that of Exodus, and does not itself read very like real history, nor is there anything in the Egyptian monuments to confirm it, but rather the reverse. Menepthah certainly reigned many years after he was said to have been drowned in the Red Sea, and his power and that of his immediate successors, though greatly diminished, still extended with a sort of suzerainty over Palestine and Southern Syria. It is said that the Egyptians purposely omitted all mention of disasters and defeats, but this is distinctly untrue, for Manetho records events such as the conquest of Egypt by the Hyksos without a battle, and the retreat of Menepthah into Ethiopia for thirteen years before the impure rebels, which were much more disgraceful than would have been the destruction of a pursuing force of chariots by the returning tide of the Red Sea. The question therefore of the sojourn of the Israelites in Egypt and the Exodus has to be considered solely by the light of the internal evidence afforded by the books of the Old Testament. The long period of 430 years is open to grave objections. It is inconceivable that a people who had lived for four centuries in an old and highly-civilized empire, for part of the time at any rate on equal or superior terms under the king who "knew Joseph"; and who appear to have been so much intermixed with the native Egyptians as to have been borrowing from them as neighbours before their flight, should have carried away with them so little of Egyptian manners and relics. Beyond a few rites and ceremonies, and a certain tendency to revert to the animal worship of the golden calf, there is nothing to show that the Hebrews had ever been in contact with Egyptian civilization. This is most remarkable in the absence of all belief in a resurrection of the body, future life, and day of judgment, which were the cardinal axioms of the practical daily life of the Egyptian people. Temporal rewards and punishments to the individual and his posterity in the present life, are the sole inducements held out to practise virtue and abstain from vice, from the Decalogue down to the comparatively late period of Ecclesiastes, where Solomon the wise king is represented as saying, "there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge in the grave whither thou goest." Even down to the Christian era the Sadducees, who were the conservative aristocracy who stood on the old ways and on the law of Moses, and from whose ranks most of the high priests were taken, were opposed to the newfangled Pharisaic doctrine of a resurrection. How completely foreign the idea was to the Jewish mind is apparent from the writings of the Prophets and the Book of Job, where the obvious solution of the problem why goodness was not always rewarded and wickedness punished, afforded by the theory of a judgment after death and future life, was never even hinted at by Job or his friends, however hardly they might be pressed in argument. If the sojourn in Egypt really lasted for 430 years, it must have embraced many of the greatest events in Egyptian history. The descendants of Jacob must have witnessed a long period of the rule of the Hyksos, and lived through the desolating thirty years' war by which these foreign conquerors were gradually driven back by the native armies of Upper Egypt. They must have been close to the scene of the final campaigns, the siege of Avaris, and the expulsion of the Hyksos. They must have been subjects of Ahmes, Thotmes, and the conquering kings of the eighteenth dynasty, who followed up the fugitive Hyksos, and carried the conquering arms of Egypt not only over Palestine and Syria, but up to the Euphrates and Tigris, and over nearly the whole of Western Asia. They must have witnessed the decline of this empire, the growth of the Hittites, and the half-century of wars waged between them and the Egyptians in Palestine and Syria. The victory of Ramses II. at Kadesh and the epic poem of Pentaur must have been known to the generation before the Exodus as signal events. And if there is any truth in the account quoted by Josephus, they must have been aware that they did not fly from Egypt as a body of fugitive slaves, but as retreating warriors who for thirteen years had held Egypt up to Ethiopia in subjection. And yet of all these memorable events there is not the slightest trace in the Hebrew annals which have come down to us. An even greater difficulty is to understand how, if the children of Israel had lived for anything like 400 years in such a civilized empire as Egypt, they could have emerged from it in such a plane of low civilization, or rather of ferocious savagery and crude superstitions as are shown by the books of the Old Testament, where they burst like a host of Red Indians on the settlements and cities of the Amorites, and other more advanced nations of Palestine. The discoveries at Lachish already referred to show that their civilization could not have exceeded that of the rudest Bedouins, and their myths and legends are so similar to those of the North American Indians as to show that they must have originated in a very similar stage of mental development. If we adopt the short date of the genealogies we are equally confronted by difficulties. If the Exodus occurred in the reign of Menepthah, 180 years back from that date would take us, not to the Hyksos dynasty where alone it would have been possible for Joseph to be a vizier, and for a Semitic tribe of shepherds to be welcomed in Egypt, but into the midst of the great and glorious eighteenth dynasty who had expelled the Hyksos, and carried the dominion of Egypt to the Euphrates. Nor would there have been time for the seventy souls, who we are told were all of the family of Jacob who migrated into Egypt, to have increased in three generations into a nation numerous enough to alarm the Egyptians, and conquer the Canaanites. The legend of Joseph is very touching and beautiful, but it may just as well be a novel as history, and this suspicion is strengthened by the fact that the episode of Potiphar's wife is almost verbatim the same as one of the chapters of the Egyptian novel of the Two Brothers . Nor does it seem likely that such a seven years' famine and such a momentous change as the conversion of all the land of Egypt from freehold into a tenure held from the king subject to payment of a rent of one-fifth of the gross produce, should have left no trace in the records. Again, the age of 110 years assigned to Joseph, and 147 to his father, are a sufficient proof that we are not upon strictly historical ground; and on the whole this narrative does not go far, in the absence of any confirmation from monuments, to assist us in fixing dates, or enabling us to form any consistent idea of the real conditions of the sojourn of the people of Israel in Egypt. It places them on far too high a level of civilization at first, to have fallen to such a low one as we find depicted in the Books of Exodus, Joshua, and Judges. Further excavations in the mounds of ruined cities in Judæa and Palestine, like those of Schliemann on the sites of Troy and Mycenæ, can alone give us anything like certain facts as to the real condition of the Hebrew tribes who destroyed the older walled cities of the comparatively civilized Amorites and Canaanites. If the conclusion of Mr. Flinders Petrie from the section of the mound of Lachish, as to the extremely rude condition of the tribes who built the second town of mud-huts on the ruins of the Amorite city, should be confirmed, it would go far to negative the idea that the accounts of their having been trained in an advanced code of Mosaic legislation, can have any historical foundation. We come next to Moses. It is difficult to refuse an historical character to a personage who has been accepted by uniform tradition as the chief who led the Israelites out of Egypt, and as the great legislator who laid the foundations of the religious and civil institutions of the peculiar people. And if the passage from Manetho is correctly quoted by Josephus, and was really taken from contemporary Egyptian annals, and is not a later version of the account in the Pentateuch modified to suit Egyptian prejudices, Moses is clearly identified with Osarsiph the priest of Hieropolis, who abandoned the worship of the old gods, and headed the revolt of the unclean people, which probably meant the heretics. It may be conjectured that this may have had some connection with the great religious revolution of the heretic king of Tel-el-Amarna, which for a time displaced the national gods, worshipped in the form of sacred animals and symbolic statues, by an approach to Monotheism under the image of the winged solar disc. Such a reform must have had many adherents to have survived as the State religion for two or three reigns, and must have left a large number of so-called heretics when the nation returned to its ancient faith; and it is quite intelligible that some of the more enlightened priests should have assimilated to it the doctrine of one Supreme God, which was always at the bottom of the religious metaphysics of the earliest ages in Egypt, and was probably preserved as an esoteric doctrine in the priestly colleges. This, however, must remain purely a conjecture, and we must look for anything specific in regard to Moses exclusively to the Old Testament. And here we are at once assailed by formidable difficulties. As long as we confine ourselves to general views it may be accepted as historical that the Israelites really came out of Egypt under a great leader and legislator; but when we come to details, and to the events connected with Moses, and to a great extent supposed to have been written by him or taken from his journals, they are for the most part more wildly and hopelessly impossible than anything related of the earlier patriarchs, Abraham and Joseph. The story of his preservation in infancy is a variation of the myth common to so many nations, of an infant hero or god, whose life is sought by a wicked king, and who is miraculously saved. We find it in the myths of Khrishna, Buddha, Cyrus, Romulus, and others, and in the inscription by Sargon I. of Accade on his own tablet; he states himself to have been saved in an ark floated on the river Euphrates, just as Moses was on the Nile. When grown up he is represented first as the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter, and then as a shepherd in the wilderness of Midian talking with the Lord in a fiery bush, who for the first time communicates his real name of Jehovah, which he says was not known to Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob, although constantly used by them, and although men began to call him by that name in the time of Enos, Adam's grandson. At Jehovah's command Moses throws his rod on the ground, when it becomes a serpent from which he flies, and when he takes it up by the tail it becomes a rod again; and as a farther sign his hand is changed from sound to leprous as white as snow, and back again to sound, in a minute or two of time. On returning to Egypt Moses is represented as going ten times into the presence of Pharaoh demanding of him to let the Hebrews depart, and inflicting on Egypt a succession of plagues, each one more than sufficient to have convinced the king of the futility of opposing such supernatural powers, and to have made him only too anxious to get rid of the Hebrews from the land at any price. What could have been the condition of Egypt, if for seven days "the streams, the rivers, the ponds and pools, and even the water in the vessels of wood and of stone, through all the land of Egypt," had been really turned into blood? And what sort of magicians must they have been who could do the same with their enchantments? The whole account of these plagues has distinctly the air of being an historical romance rather than real history. Those repeated interviews accompanied by taunts and reproaches of Moses, the representative of an oppressed race of slaves, in the august presence of a Pharaoh who, like the Inca of Peru or the Mikado of Japan, was half monarch and half deity, are totally inconsistent with all we know of Egyptian usage. The son and successor of the splendid Ramses II., who has been called the Louis XIV. of Egyptian history, would certainly, after the first interview and miracle, either have recognized the supernatural power which it was useless to resist, or ordered Moses to instant execution. It is remarkable also how the series of plagues reproduce the natural features of the Egyptian seasons. Recent travellers tell us how at the end of the dry season when the Nile is at its lowest, and the adjacent plains are arid and lifeless, suddenly one morning at sunrise they see the river apparently turned into blood. It is the phenomenon of the red Nile, which is caused by the first flush of the Abyssinian flood, coming from banks of red marl. After a few days the real rise commences, the Nile resumes its usual colour, percolates through its banks, fills the tanks and ponds, and finally overflows and saturates the dusty plains. The first signal of the renewal of life is the croaking of innumerable frogs, and soon the plains are alive with flies, gnats, and all manner of creeping and hopping insects, as if the dust had been turned into lice. Then after the inundation subsides come the other plagues which in the summer and autumn seasons frequently afflict the young crops and the inhabitants—local hail-storms, locusts, murrain among the cattle, boils and other sicknesses while the stagnant waters are drying up. It reads like what some Rider Haggard of the Court of Solomon might have written in working up the tales of travellers and old popular traditions into an historical romance of the deliverance of Israel from Egypt. When we come to the Exodus the impossibilities of the narrative are even more obvious. The robust common-sense of Bishop Colenso, sharpened by a mathematical education, has reduced many of these to the convincing test of arithmetic. The host of Israelites who left Egypt is said to have comprised 603,550 fighting men above the age of twenty; exclusive of the Levites and of a mixed multitude who followed. This implies a total population of at least 2,500,000, who are said to have wandered about for forty years in the desert of Sinai, one of the most arid wildernesses in the world, destitute alike of water, arable soil, and pasture, and where a Bedouin tribe of even 600 souls would find it difficult to exist. They are said to have been miraculously fed during these forty years on manna, a sweetish, gummy exudation from the scanty foliage of certain prickly desert plants, which is described as being "as small as the hoar frost," and as being so imbued with Sabbatarian principles, as to keep fresh only for the day it is gathered during the week, but for two days if gathered on a Friday, so as to prevent the necessity of doing any work on the Sabbath. Bishop Colenso points out with irresistible force the obvious impossibilities in regard to food, water, fuel, sanitation, transport, and other matters, which was involved in the supposition that a population, half as large as that of London, wandered about under tents from camp to camp for forty years in a desert. No attempt has ever been made to refute him, except by vague suppositions that the deserts of Sinai and Arabia may then have been in a very different condition, and capable of supporting a large population. But this is impossible in the present geological age and under existing geographical conditions. These deserts form part of the great rainless zone of the earth between the north tropical and south temperate zones, where cultivation is only possible when the means of irrigation are afforded by lakes, rivers, or melting snow. But there are none of these in the deserts of Sinai and Northern Arabia, and therefore no water and no vegetation sufficient to support any population. No army has ever invaded Egypt from Asia, or Asia from Egypt, except by the short route adjoining the Mediterranean between Pelusium and Jaffa, and with the command of the sea and assistance of trains to carry supplies and water. And the account in Exodus itself confirms this, for both food and water are stated to have been supplied miraculously, and there is no mention made of anything but the present arid and uninhabited desert in the various encampments and marches. In fact, the Bible constantly dwells on the inhospitable character of the "howling wilderness," where there was neither grass nor water. Accordingly reconcilers have been reduced to the supposition that ciphers may have been added by copyists, and that the real number may have been 6000, or even, as some writers think, 600. But this is inconsistent with the detailed numeration by twelve separate tribes, which works out to the same figure of 603,550 fighting men for the total number. Nor is it consistent with the undoubted fact that the Hebrews did evacuate Egypt in sufficient numbers and sufficiently armed to burst through the frontiers, and capture the walled cities of considerable nations like the Amorites and Canaanites, who had been long settled in the country. The narrative of Manetho, quoted by Josephus, seems much more like real history; that the Hebrews formed part of an army, which, after having held Lower Egypt for thirteen years, was finally defeated, and retreated by the usual military route across the short part of the desert from Pelusium to Palestine, the Hebrews, for some reason, branching off, and taking to a Bedouin life on the outskirts of the desert and cultivated land, just as many Bedouin tribes live a semi-nomad life in the same regions at the present day. Apart from statistics, however, the Books of the Pentateuch ascribed to Moses are full of the most flagrant contradictions and absurdities. It is evident that, instead of being the production of some one contemporary writer, they have been compiled and edited, probably many times over, by what I have called the "scissors and paste method," of clipping out extracts from old documents and traditions, and piecing them together in juxtaposition or succession, without regard to their being contradictory or repetitions. Thus in Exodus xxxiii. 20, God says to Moses: "Thou canst not see my face and live; for there shall no man see me and live"; and accordingly he shows Moses only his "back parts"; while in ver. 11 in the very same chapter we read, "And the Lord spoke unto Moses face to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend." Again in Exodus xxiv. the Lord says to Moses, "that he alone shall come near the Lord" (ver. 2), while in vers. 9—11 of the same chapter, we are told that "Moses, Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel went up; and they saw the God of Israel, and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone," and although they saw God, were none the worse for it, but survived and "did eat and drink." Is it possible to believe that these excessively crude representations of the Deity, and these flagrant inconsistencies, were all written at the same time, by the same hand, and that the hand of a man who, if not a holy inspired prophet, was at any rate an educated and learned ex-priest of Hieropolis, skilled in all the knowledge of the Egyptians? The contradictions in the ideas and precepts of morality and religion are even more startling. These oscillate between the two extremes of the conception of the later prophets of a one Supreme God, who loves justice and mercy better than sacrifice, and that of a ferocious and vindictive tribal god, whose appetite for human blood is as insatiable as that of the war-god of the Mexicans. Thus we have, on the one hand, the commandment, "Thou shalt do no murder," and on the other, the injunction to commit indiscriminate massacres. A single instance may suffice. The "Book of the Law of Moses" is quoted in 2 Kings xiv. as saying, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor the children for the fathers; but every man shall be put to death for his own sin." In Numbers xxxi., Moses, the "meekest of mankind," is represented as extremely wroth with the captains who, having warred against Midian at the Lord's command, had only slaughtered the males, and taken the women of Midian and their little ones captives; and he commands them to "kill every male among the little ones, and every woman that hath known man by lying with him; but all the women children that have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves." These Midianites, be it remembered, being the people whose high priest Jethro had hospitably received Moses when he fled for his life from Egypt, and gave him his daughter as a wife, by whom he had children who were half Midianites, so that if the zealous Phinehas was right in slaying the Hebrew who had married a Midianite woman, Moses himself deserved the same fate. The same injunction of indiscriminate massacre in order to escape the jealous wrath of an offended Jehovah is repeated, over and over again, in Joshua and Judges, and even as late as after the foundation of the Monarchy, we find Samuel telling Saul in the name of the Lord of Hosts, to "go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy them, slaying both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass," and denouncing Saul, and hewing Agag in pieces before the Lord, because this savage injunction had not been literally obeyed. Even under David, the man after the Lord's own heart, we find him torturing to death the prisoners taken at the fall of Rabbah, and giving up seven of the sons of Saul to the Gibeonites to be sacrificed before the Lord as human victims. It is one of the strangest contradictions of human nature that such atrocious violations of the moral sense should have been received for so many centuries as a divine revelation, rather than as instances of what may be more appropriately called "devil worship." Nor is it a less singular proof of the power of cherished prepossessions that such a medley of the sublime religious ideas and lofty poetry of the prophetic ages, with such a mass of puerile and absurd legends, such obvious contradictions, and such a number of passages obviously dating from a later period, should be received by many men of intelligence, even to the present day, as the work of a single contemporary writer, the inspired prophet Moses. When we pass from the Pentateuch to the succeeding Books of Joshua and of Judges the same remarks apply. The falling of the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpet, and the defeat of an army of 135,000 men of Midian and Amalek with a slaughter of 120,000, by 300 men under Gideon, armed with pitchers and trumpets, are on a par with the wandering of 2,500,000 Israelites in the desert for forty years, fed with manna of the size of hoar-frost. The moral atmosphere also continues to be that of Red Indians down to the time of David, for we read of nothing but murders and massacres, sometimes of other races, sometimes of one tribe by another; while the actions selected for special commendation are like those of Jael, who drove a nail into the head of the sleeping fugitive whom she had invited into her tent; or of Jephthah, who sacrificed his daughter as an offering to the Lord in obedience to a vow. This barbarous state of manners is confirmed by Flinders Petrie's discoveries at the supposed site of Lachish, which show the ruins of a walled city of the Amorites, built upon by the mud hovels of a race as rude as the rudest Bedouins who now wander on the edge of the Arabian desert. The only safe conclusion seems to be that authentic annals of Jewish history only begin with the Monarchy, and that everything prior to David and Solomon, or possibly Saul and Samuel, consists of myth, legend, and oral tradition, so inextricably blended, and so mixed up with successive later additions, as to give no certain information as to events or dates. All that it is safe to assume is, that in a general way the Hebrews were originally a Semitic tribe who migrated from Chaldæa into Palestine and thence into Egypt, where they remained for an uncertain time and were oppressed by the national dynasty which expelled the Hyksos; that they left Egypt probably in the reign of Menepthah, and as a consequence of the rebellion recorded by Manetho; that they then lived for an unknown time as wandering Bedouins on the frontier of Palestine in a state of very rude barbarism; and finally burst in like a horde of Aztecs on the older and more civilized Toltecs of Mexico. For a long period after this, perhaps for 200 or 300 years, they lived in a state of chronic warfare with one another, and with their neighbours, massacring and being massacred with the alternate vicissitudes of war, but with the same rudeness and ferocity of superstitions and manners. Gradually, however, they advanced in civilization, and something of a national feeling arose, which led to a partial consolidation under priests, and a more complete one under kings. The first king, Saul, was opposed by priestly influence and defeated and slain in battle, but a captain of condottieri, David, arose, a man of great energy and military genius, who gradually formed a standing army and conquered province after province, until at his death he left to his successor, Solomon, an empire extending from the frontier of Egypt to Damascus, and from the Red Sea almost to the Mediterranean. This kingdom commanded two of the great commercial routes between the East and West, the caravan route between Tyre and Babylon, viâ Damascus and Tadmor, and the route from Tyre to the terminus at Ezion-Gebir, of the sea-routes to Arabia, Africa, and India. Solomon entered into close commercial relations with Tyre, and during his long and splendid reign, Jerusalem blossomed rapidly into a wealthy and a cultured city, and the surrounding cities and districts shared in the general prosperity. The greatness of the kingdom did not last long, for the revolt of the ten tribes and the growth of other powers soon reduced Judæa and Samaria to political insignificance; but Jerusalem, down to the time of its final destruction by Nebuchadnezzar, i.e. for a period of some 400 years after Solomon, never seems to have lost its character of a considerable and civilized city. It is evident from the later prophets that it was the seat of a good deal of wealth and luxury, for their invectives are, to a great extent, what we should call at the present day, Socialist denunciations of the oppression of the poor by the rich, land-grabbing by the powerful, and extravagance of dress by the ladies of fashion. There were hereditary nobles, organized colleges of priests and scribes, and no doubt there was a certain amount of intellectual life and literary activity. But of a sacred book there is no trace until the discovery of one in the Temple in the reign of Josiah; and the peculiar tenets of modern Judaism had no real hold on the mass of the people until after the return from Exile and the reforms of Ezra and Nehemiah. The history, therefore, contained in the Old Testament is comparatively modern. There is nothing which can be relied on as authentic in regard to events and dates prior to the establishment of the Monarchy, and even the wildest myths and the most impossible legends do not carry us back within 2000 years of the time when we have genuine historical annals attested by monuments both in Egypt and Chaldæa. PART II. EVIDENCE FROM SCIENCE. CHAPTER VIII. GEOLOGY AND PALÆONTOLOGY. Proved by Contemporary Monuments—As in History—Summary of Historical Evidence—Geological Evidence of Human Periods—Neolithic Period—Palæolithic or Quaternary—Tertiary—Secondary and Older Periods—The Recent or Post-Glacial Period—Lake-Villages—Bronze Age—Kitchen-Middens—Scandinavian Peat-mosses—Neolithic Remains comparatively Modern—Definition of Post-Glacial Period—Its Duration—Mellard Read's Estimate—Submerged Forests—Changes in Physical Geography—Huxley—Objections from America—Niagara—Quaternary Period—Immense Antiquity—Presence of Man throughout—First Glacial Period—Scandinavian and Laurentian Ice-caps—Immense Extent—Mass of Débris —Elevation and Depression—In Britain—Inter-Glacial and Second Glacial Periods—Antiquity measured by Changes of Land—Lyell's Estimate—Glacial Débris and Loess—Recent Erosion—Bournemouth—Evans—Prestwich—Wealden Ridge and Southern Drift—Contain Human Implements—Evidence from New World—California. We have now to take leave of historical records and fall back on the exact sciences for further traces of human origins. Our guides are still contemporary records, but these are no longer stately tombs and temples, massive pyramids and written inscriptions. Instead of these we have flint implements, incised bones, and a few rare specimens of human skulls and skeletons, the meaning of which has to be deciphered by skilled experts in their respective departments of science. Still these records tell their tale as conclusively as any hieroglyphic or cuneiform writings in Egyptian manuscripts or on Babylonian cylinders. The celt, the knife, the lance and arrow-heads, and other weapons and implements, can be traced in an uninterrupted progressive series from the oldest and rudest palæolithic specimens, up to the highly-finished ones of polished stone, and through these into the age of metals, and into historic times and the actual implements of existing savage races. It is impossible to doubt that one of the palæolithic celts from St. Acheul or St. Prest is as truly a work of the human hand, guided by human intelligence, as a modern axe; and that an arrow-head from Moustier or Kent's Cavern is no more an elf-bolt, or a lusus naturæ , than is a Winchester rifle. Before entering on this new line of investigation, it may be well to sum up briefly the evidence as to the starting-point from history and tradition. The commencement of the strictly historical period takes us back certainly for 6000 and in all probability for 7000 years in Egypt, and certainly for 5000 and probably for 6000 or 7000 years in Chaldæa. In each case we find populous cities, important temples and public works, writing and other advanced arts and industries, and all the signs of an old civilization already existing. Other nations also evidently then existed with whom these ancient empires had relations of war and of commerce, though the annals of even the oldest of them, such as China, do not carry us back further than from 4000 to 5000 years. Traditions do not add much to our information from monuments, and fade rapidly away into myths and legends. The oldest and most authentic, those of Egypt, simply confirm the inference of great antiquity for its civilization prior to Menes, but give no clue as to its origin. They neither trace it up to the stone age, which we know existed in the valley of the Nile, nor refer it to any foreign source. The Egyptian people thought themselves autochthonous, and attributed their arts, industries, and sciences to the inventions of native gods, or demi-gods, who reigned like mortal kings, in a remote and fabulous antiquity. We can gather nothing therefore from tradition that would enable us to add even 1000 years with certainty to the date of Menes; while from the high state of civilization which had been evolved prior to his accession, from the primitive conditions of the stone period whose remains are found at Cairo and Thebes, we might fairly add 10,000 or 20,000 years to his date of 5004 years b.c. , as a matter of probable conjecture for the first dawn of historical civilization. In any case we shall be well within the mark if we take 10,000 years as our first unit, or standard of chronological measurement, with which to start in our further researches, as we do with terrestrial standards in gauging the distances of suns and stars. It may be well also to supplement this statement of the historical standard by a brief review of the previous geological periods through which evidences of man's existence can be traced. Immediately behind the historic age lies the recent period during which the existing fauna and flora, climate and configuration of seas and lands, have undergone no material change. It is characterized generally as the neolithic period, in which we find polished stone superseding the older and ruder forms of chipped stone, and passing itself into the copper, bronze, and iron ages of early history. It may also be called the recent or post-glacial period, for it coincides with the final disappearance of the last great glaciation, and the establishment of conditions of climate resembling those of the present day. Behind this again comes the quaternary or pleistocene period, so called from its fauna, which, although containing extinct species, shows along with them many existing forms, some of which have migrated and some remain. This also may be called the glacial period, for although the commencement, termination, and different phases of the two great glaciations and intermediate inter-glacial periods cannot be exactly defined, and hard-and-fast lines drawn between the later pliocene at one end and the post-glacial at the other, there is no doubt that in a general way the quaternary and glacial periods coincide, and that the changes of climate were to a considerable extent the cause of the changes of flora and fauna. Behind the quaternary comes in the tertiary, with its three great divisions of Pliocene, Miocene, and Eocene, each containing numerous subdivisions, and all showing a progressive advance in forms of life, from older and more generalized types towards newer and more specialized ones, and a constant approach towards genera and species now existing. Behind the tertiary comes the secondary period, into which it is unnecessary to enter for the present purpose, for all is different, and even mammalian life is only known to be present in a few forms of small and feeble marsupials. Nor is it necessary to enter on any detailed consideration of the Eocene or earlier tertiary, for the types of mammalian life are so different from those of later periods, that it cannot be supposed that any animal so highly organized as man had then come into existence. The utmost we can suppose is that, as in the case of the horse, some ancestral form from which the quadrumana and man may possibly have been developed may be found. But up to the present time nothing has been found in the Eocene more nearly approaching such a missing link than an ancient form of lemur; and it is not until we get into the Miocene that any evidence presents itself that man, or some near ancestor of man, may possibly have existed. [8] My present object being not to write a book on geology, but on human origins, I shall not attempt to trace back the geological evidence beyond the Miocene, or to enter on any details of the later periods, except so far as they bear on what may be called geological chronology, i.e. on the probable dates which may be assigned to the first appearance and subsequent evolution of the human race going back from historical times. Beginning with the recent or post-glacial period, the Swiss and Italian lake-villages supply clear evidence of the progress of man in Western Europe through the neolithic into the historical period. They afford us an unbroken series of substantially the same state of society, existing down to the time of the Romans, for a great many centuries back of communities living in lake-villages built upon piles, like the villages in Thrace described by Herodotus, or those of the present day in New Guinea. Some of these have been occupied continuously, so that the débris of different ages are stored in consecutive order like geological strata, and afford an unerring test of their relative antiquity. It is clear that many of those lake-villages were founded in the age of stone, and passed through that of bronze into the age of iron. The oldest settlements belong to the neolithic age, and contain polished stone implements and pottery, but they show a state of civilization not yet very far advanced. The inhabitants were only just emerging from the hunting into the pastoral stage. They lived principally on the produce of the chase, the bones of the stag and wild boar being very plentiful, while those of ox and sheep are rare. Agriculture and the cereals seem to have been unknown, though stores of acorns and hazel nuts were found which had been roasted for food. By degrees the bones of wild animals become scarce, and those of ox and sheep common, showing that the pastoral stage had been reached; and the goat, pig, and horse were added to the list of domestic animals—the dog being included from the first, and the horse only at a later period. Agriculture follows next in order, and considerable proficiency was attained, barley and wheat being staple articles of food, and apples, pears, and other fruit being stored for winter consumption. Flax also was grown, and the arts of spinning and weaving were introduced, so that clothing, instead of being confined to skins, was made of coarse linen and woollen stuffs. The most important advance, however, in the arts of civilization is afforded by the introduction of metals. These begin to appear about the middle of the neolithic period, at first very sparingly, and in a few districts such as Spain, Upper Italy, and Hungary, where native copper was found and was hammered into shapes modelled on the old stone implements; but as a general rule, and in all the later settlements, bronze, in new and improved shapes, supersedes stone and copper. For the most part these bronze implements seem to have been obtained by foreign commerce from the Phœnicians, Etruscans, and other nations bordering on the Mediterranean, though in some cases they were cast on the spot from native or imported ores. The existence of bronze, however, must go back to a far greater antiquity than the time when the neolithic people of Europe obtained their first supplies from Phœnician traders. Bronze, as we have seen in a former chapter, is an alloy of two metals, copper and tin, and the hardest and most serviceable alloy is only to be obtained by mixing the two in a certain definite proportion. Now it is to be noted, that nearly all the prehistoric bronze found in Europe is an alloy in this definite proportion. Clearly all this bronze, or the art of making it, must have originated from some common centre. All this, however, is very conjectural, and all that can be concluded from it is, that any indications as to the antiquity of man derived from the bronze age as known to us in Europe, hardly carry us back to dates as remote as those furnished by the monuments of Egypt and Chaldæa. Indeed, there are no facts certainly known to us from remains of the bronze age in Europe that imply a greater antiquity than 1500 or possibly 2000 years b.c. , a date at which bronze had undoubtedly been already known in Egypt and the East for many centuries. The neolithic period which preceded that of metals is of longer duration, but still comparatively recent. Attempts have been made to measure it by a sort of natural chronometer in the case of the lake-villages, by comparing the amount of silting up since the villages were built with the known rate of silting up since Roman times. The calculations vary very much, and can only be taken as approximative; but the oldest dates assigned do not exceed 5000 b.c. , and most of them are not more than 2000 or 3000 b.c. It must be remembered however that the foundation of a lake-village on piles implies a long antecedent neolithic period, to have arrived at a stage of civilization which made the construction of such villages possible. This civilization coincides wonderfully with that of the primitive Aryans as shown by linguistic palæontology. The discussion as to the origin of the Aryans has thrown a great deal of light on this question, and has gone far to dispel the old notion that they radiated from some centre in Asia, and overran Europe in successive waves. On the contrary, all the evidence and all the best authorities point to their having occupied, when we first get traces of them, pretty much the same districts of the great plain of Northern Europe and Southern Russia as we now find them in, and developed there their distinct dialects and nationalities; while the words common to all or nearly all the Aryan families point to their having been pastoral nomads, in a state of civilization very like that of the earlier lake-villagers, before this separation took place. The Scandinavian kitchen-middens, or shell-mounds, carry us further back into this early neolithic period. The shell-mounds which are found in great numbers along the Baltic shore of Denmark are often of great size. They are formed of an accumulation of shells of oysters, mussels, and other shell-fish, bones of wild animals, birds, and fish, all of existing species, with numerous implements of flint or bone, and occasional fragments of coarse pottery. They are decidedly more archaic than the lake-dwellings, showing a much ruder civilization of savages living like the Fuegians of the present day, in scanty tribes on the sea-shore, supported mainly by shell-fish, supplemented by the chase of wild animals. The dog was their only domestic animal, and their only arts the fabrication of rude pottery and implements of stone and bone, unless it can be inferred from the occasional presence of bones of cod and other deep-sea fish, that they possessed some form of boat or canoe, and had hooks and lines or nets. These mounds must have taken an enormous time to accumulate, for they are very numerous, and often of great bulk, some of them being 1000 feet long, 200 feet wide, and ten feet thick. How long such masses must have taken to accumulate must be apparent when we consider that the state of civilization implies a very scanty population. It has been calculated that if the neolithic population of Denmark required as many square miles for its support as the similar existing populations of Greenland and Patagonia, their total number could not have exceeded 1000, and each mound must have been the accumulation of perhaps two or three families. Ancient, however, as these mounds must be, they are clearly neolithic. They are sharply distinguished from the far older remains of the palæolithic period by the knowledge, however rude, of pottery and polished stone, and still more by the fauna, which is entirely recent, and from which the extinct animals of the quaternary period have disappeared; while the position of the mounds shows that only slight geological changes, such as are now going on, have occurred since they were accumulated. Similar mounds, on even a larger scale, occur on the sea-coasts of various districts in Europe and America, but they afford no indication of their date beyond that of great antiquity. The peat-mosses of Denmark have been appealed to as affording something like a conjectural date for the early neolithic period in that country. These are formed in hollows of the glacial drift, which have been small lakes or ponds in the midst of forests, into which trees have fallen, and which have become gradually converted into peat by the growth of marsh plants. It is clearly established that there have been three successive ages of forest growth, the upper one of beech, below it one of oak, and lowest of all one of fir. The implements and relics found in the beech stratum are all modern, those in the oak stratum are of the later neolithic and bronze ages, and those in the lowest, or fir-horizon, are earlier and ruder neolithic, resembling those found in the older lake-villages and shell-mounds. Now beech has been the characteristic forest tree of Denmark certainly since the Roman period, or for 2000 years, and no one can say for how much longer. If the speculations as to the origin of the Aryan race in Northern Europe are correct, it must have been for very much longer, as the word for beech is common to so many of the dialects into which the primitive Aryan language became divided. The stages of oaks and firs must equally have been of long duration, and the different stages could only have been brought about by slow secular variations of climate during the post-glacial period. Still this affords no reliable information as to specific dates, and we can only take Steenstrup's calculation of from 4000 to 16,000 years for the formation of some of these peat-bogs as a very vague estimate, and this only carries us back to a time when Egypt and Chaldæa must have been already densely peopled, and far advanced in civilization. On the whole, it seems that the neolithic arrow-heads found in Egypt, and the fragments of pottery brought up by borings through the deposits of the Nile, are the oldest certain human relics of the neolithic age which have yet been discovered, and these do not carry us back further than a possible date of 15,000 or 20,000 years b.c. Nor is there any certainty that any of the neolithic remains found in the newer deposits of rivers and the upper strata of caves go further, or even so far back as these relics of an Egyptian stone period. All that the evidence really shows is, that while the neolithic period must have lasted for a long time as compared with historical standards, its duration is almost infinitesimally small as compared with that of the preceding palæolithic period. Thus in Kent's Cavern neolithic remains are only found in a small surface layer of black earth from three to twelve inches thick; while below this, palæolithic implements and a quaternary fauna occur in an upper stalagmite one to three feet thick, below it in red cave earth five to six feet thick; then in a lower stalagmite in places ten or twelve feet thick, and below it again in a breccia three or four feet thick. This is confirmed by the evidence of all the caves explored in all parts of the world, which uniformly show any neolithic remains confined to a superficial layer of a few inches with many feet of palæolithic strata below them. And river-drifts in the same manner show neolithic remains confined to the alluvia and peat-beds of existing streams, while palæolithic remains occur during the whole series of deposits while these rivers were excavating their present valleys. If we say feet for inches, or twelve for one, we shall be well within the mark in estimating the comparative duration of the palæolithic and neolithic periods, as measured by the thickness of their deposits in caves and river-drifts; and as we shall see hereafter, other geological evidence from elevations and depressions, denudations and depositions, point to even a higher figure. In going back from the neolithic into the palæolithic period, we are confronted by the difficulty to which I have already referred, of there being no hard-and-fast lines by which geological eras are clearly separated from one another. Zoologically there seems to be a very decided break between the recent and the quaternary. The instances are rare and doubtful in which we can see any trace of the remains of palæolithic man, and of the fauna of extinct animals, passing gradually into those of neolithic and recent times. But geologically there is no such abrupt break. We cannot draw a line at the culmination of the last great glaciation and say, here the glacial period ends and the post-glacial begins. Nor can we say of any definite period or horizon, this is glacial and this recent. A great number of palæolithic remains and of quaternary fossils are undoubtedly post-glacial in the sense of being found in deposits which have accumulated since the last great glaciers and ice-caps began to retreat. Existing valleys have been excavated to a great extent since the present rivers, swollen by the melting snows and torrential rains of this period of the latest glacial retreat, superseded old lines of drainage, and began to wear down the surface of the earth into its present aspect. This phase is more properly included in the term glacial, for both the coming on and the disappearance of the periods of intense cold are as much part of the phenomenon as their maximum culmination, and very probably occupied much longer intervals of time. In like manner, we cannot positively say when this post-glacial period ended and the recent began. Not, I should say, until the exceptional effects of the last great glacial period had finally disappeared, and the climate, geographical conditions, and fauna had assumed nearly or entirely the modern conditions in which we find them at the commencement of history. And this may have been different in different countries, for local conditions might make the glacial period commence sooner and continue later in some districts than in others. Thus in North America, where the glaciation was more intense, and the ice-cap extended some ten degrees further south than in Europe, it might well be that it was later in retreating and disappearing. The elevation of the Laurentian highlands into the region of perpetual snow was evidently one main factor of the American ice-cap, just as that of Scandinavia was of that of Europe, and it by no means follows that their depression was simultaneous. It would be unwise, for instance, to take the time occupied in cutting back the Niagara gorge by a river which only began to run at some stage of the post-glacial period, as an absolute test of the duration of that period all over the world. Indeed, the glacial period cannot be said to have ended and the post-glacial begun at the present day in Greenland, if the disappearance of the ice-cap over very extensive regions is to be taken as the test. Any approximation to the duration of the post-glacial period in any given locality can only be obtained by defining its commencement with the first deposits which lie above the latest glacial drift, and measuring the amount of work done since. This has been done very carefully by the officers of the Geological Survey and other eminent authorities in England and Scotland, and the result clearly shows that since the last glaciation left the country buried in a thick mantle of boulder-clay and drift, such an amount of denudation, and such movements of elevation and depression have taken place, as must have required a great lapse of time. The most complete attempt at an estimate of this time is that made by Mr. Mellard Read of the Geological Survey, from the changes proved to have occurred in the Mersey valley. In this case it is shown that the valley, almost in its present dimensions, must have been first carved out of an uniform plain of glacial drift and upper boulder-clay by sub-aërial denudation; then that a depression let the sea into the valley and accumulated a series of estuarine clays and silts; then an elevation raised the whole into a plain on which grew an extensive forest of oak rooted in the clays; this again must have subsided and let in the sea for a second time, which must have remained long enough to leave a large estuarine deposit, and finally the whole must have been raised to the present level before historical times. The phenomenon of the submerged forest is a very general one, being traced along almost all the sea-coasts of Western Europe, where shelving shores and sheltered bays favour the preservation of patches of this primæval forest. It testifies to a considerable amount of elevation and subsequent depression, for its remains can be traced below low-water mark, and are occasionally dredged up far out to sea, and stately oaks could not have flourished unless more or less continental conditions had prevailed. It is evident that in this age of forests the German Ocean must have been dry land, and the continent of Europe must have extended beyond the Orkneys and Hebrides, probably to the hundred fathom line. Such movements of elevation and depression, so far as we know anything of them, are extremely slow. There has been no change in the fords of rivers in Britain since Roman times, and the spit connecting St. Michael's Mount with Cornwall was dry at ebb and covered at flood as at the present day, when the British carted their tin across it to trade with the Phœnicians 2500 years ago. Mr. Read goes into elaborate calculations based on the time required for these geological changes, and arrives at the conclusion that they point to a date of not less than 50,000 or 60,000 years ago for the commencement of the post-glacial period. These calculations are disputed, but it seems certain that several multiples of the historical standard of say 10,000 years, must be required to measure the period since the glacial age finally disappeared, and the earth, with its existing fauna, climate, and geographical conditions, came fairly into view. This is confirmed by the great changes which have taken place in the distribution of land and water since the quaternary period. Huxley, in an article on the Aryan question, points out that in recent times four great separate bodies of water—the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and Lake Balkash—occupied the southern end of the vast plains which extend from the Arctic Sea to the highlands of the Balkan peninsula, of Asia Minor, of Persia and Afghanistan, and of the high plateaux of Central Asia, as far as the Altai. But he says, "This state of things is comparatively modern. At no very distant period the land of Asia Minor was continuous with that of Europe, across the present site of the Bosphorus, forming a barrier several hundred feet high, which dammed up the waters of the Black Sea. A vast extent of Eastern Europe and of west-central Asia thus became one vast Ponto-Aralian Mediterranean, into which the largest rivers of Europe and Asia, the Danube, Volga, Oxus, and Jaxartes, discharged their waters, and which sent its overflow northwards through the present basin of the Obi." The time necessary for such changes goes far to confirm Mellard Read's estimate for the long duration of the recent or post-glacial period. In fact, all the evidence from the Old World goes to confirm the long duration of the post-glacial period, and the immensely greater antiquity of the glacial period taken as a whole. It is only from the New World that any serious arguments are forthcoming to abridge those periods, or rather the post-glacial period, for that alone is affected by the facts adduced. It is said that recent measurements of the recession of the Falls of Niagara show, that instead of requiring 35,000 years, as estimated by Lyell, to cut back the gorge of seven miles from Kingston to the Falls, 10,000 years at the outside would have been amply sufficient; and that this is confirmed by the gorges of other rivers, such as that of the Mississippi at St. Paul's. The evidence is not conclusive, for it depends on the rate of erosion going on for the last twenty or thirty years, which may obviously give a different result from the true average, and in fact older estimates, based on longer periods, gave the rate adopted by Lyell. But if we admit the accuracy of the modern estimates, it does not affect the total duration of the glacial period, but simply that of a late phase of the post-glacial, when the ice-cap which covered North America to a depth often of 2000 or 3000 feet, had melted away and shrunk back 400 miles from its original southern boundary, so as to admit of the waters of the great lakes finding an outlet to the north-east instead of by the old drainage to the south. Nothing is more likely than that, as the great Laurentian ice-cap of America was deeper and extended further than the Scandinavian ice-cap of Europe, it may have taken longer to melt the larger accumulation of ice, and thus postponed the establishment of post-glacial conditions and river-drainage to a later period than in the warmer and more insular climate of Europe. It is a matter of everyday observation, that the larger a snowball is the longer it takes to melt, and that when the mass is large it requires a long time to make it disappear even after mild weather has set in. The only other argument for a short glacial period is drawn from the rate of advance of the glaciers in Greenland, which is shown to be much more rapid than that of the glaciers of Switzerland, from which former calculations had been made. But obviously the rate at which the fronts of glaciers advance when forced by a mass of continental ice down fiords on a steep descending gradient, into a deep sea, where the front is floated off in icebergs, affords no clue as to that of an ice-cap spread, with a front of 1000 miles, over half a continent, retarded by friction, and surmounting mountain chains 3000 feet high. Nor does the rate of advance afford the slightest clue to the time during which the ice-cap may have remained stationary, alternately advanced and retreated, and finally disappeared. [9] We have now to adjust our time-telescope to a wider range, and see what the Quaternary or glacial period teaches us as to the antiquity of man. The first remark is, that if the post-glacial period is much longer than that for which we have historical records, the glacial exceeds the post-glacial in a far higher proportion. The second, that throughout the whole of this glacial period, from its commencement to its close, we have conclusive evidence of the existence of man, and that not only in a few limited localities, but widely spread over nearly all the habitable regions of the earth. The first point has been so conclusively established by all geologists of all countries, from the time of Lyell down to the present day, that it is unnecessary to enter on any detailed arguments, and the leading facts may be taken as established. It may be sufficient, therefore, if I give a short summary of those facts, and quote a few of the instances which show the enormous lapse of time which must have elapsed between the close of the tertiary and the commencement of the modern epoch. The glacial period was not one and simple, but comprised several phases. During the Pliocene the climate was gradually becoming colder, and either towards its close or at the commencement of the Quaternary, this culminated in a first and most intense glaciation. Ice-caps radiating from Scandinavia crept outwards, filling up the North Sea, crossing valleys and mountains, and covering with their boulders and moraines a wide circle, embracing Britain down to the Thames valley, Germany to the Hartz mountains, and Russia almost as far east as the Urals. In North America a still more massive ice-cap overflowed mountain ranges 3000 feet high, and covered the whole eastern half of the continent with an unbroken mantle of ice as far south as New York and Washington. At the same time every great mountain chain and high plateau sent out enormous glaciers, which, in the case of the Alps, filled up the valley of the Rhone and the Lake of Geneva, buried the whole of the lower country of Switzerland under 3000 feet of ice, and left the boulders of its terminal moraine, carried from the Mont Blanc range, at that height on the opposite range of the Jura. Nor is this a solitary instance. We find everywhere traces of enormous glaciers in the Pyrenees and Carpathians, the Atlas and Lebanon, the Taurus and Caucasus, the highlands of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales; in the Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada; the Andes and Cordilleras of South America; in South Africa and in New Zealand. These may not have all been simultaneous, but they certainly all belong to the same period of the great glaciation, and show that it must have been affected by some general cause, and not been entirely due to mere local accidents. How this first great glacial period came on, or how long it lasted, we do not know, unless Croll's astronomical theory, which will be considered later, affords a clue. But we know generally that it must have lasted for an immense time from the amount of work done and the changes which took place. The ice, which covered so great a portion of the northern hemisphere, was not a polar ice-cap, but spread outwards in all directions from great masses of elevated land, as is proved conclusively from the direction of the striæ which were engraved by it on the subjacent rocks. This land must have been more elevated than at present, so as to rise, like Greenland, far into the region of perpetual snow, where all rain falls and accumulates in the solid form; and also to supply the enormous mass of débris which the ice-caps and glaciers left behind them. It is not too much to say that a million of square miles in Europe, and more in North America, were covered by the débris of rocks ground down by these glaciers, and often to great depths. Most of the débris of the first glaciation have been removed by denudation, or ploughed out by the second great advance of the ice, leaving only the larger and harder boulders to testify to their extent; but enough remains to show that the first series of boulder-clays and drifts must have been on a scale larger than those of the second and subsequent glaciations, which now form the superficial stratum of so much of the earth's surface, and often attain a depth of several hundred feet. Wright, in his Ice Age in North America , estimates that "not less than 1,000,000 square miles of territory in North America is still covered with an average depth of fifty feet of glacial débris ." However, this first period of elevation and of intense glaciation passed away, and was succeeded by one of depression and of milder climate. Whether or no the depression was due, as some think, to the weight of the enormous mass of ice weighing down the yielding crust of the earth, and whether or no the milder climate was partly occasioned by this depression letting in the sea, the fact is certain that the two coincided, and were general and not merely local phenomena. Marine shells at the top of what are now high hills, and which during the preceding glaciation were probably higher, attest the fact that a large amount of land must have sunk below the sea towards the close of this first glacial period. It is equally clear that a long inter-glacial period ensued, during which many changes took place in the geographical conditions and in the fauna and flora, requiring a very long time. Thus Britain, which had been reduced to an Arctic Archipelago, in which only a few of the highest mountain peaks emerged as frozen islands, became united to the continent, and the abode of a fauna consisting in great part of African animals. At one time boreal shells were deposited, at the bottom of an Arctic ocean, on what is now the top of Moel-Tryfen in Wales, a hill 1300 feet above the present sea-level; while at another the hippopotamus found its way, in some great river flowing from the south, as far north as Yorkshire, and the remains of African animals such as the hyena accumulated in our caves. In Southern France we had at one time a vegetation of the Arctic willow and reindeer moss, at another that of the fig-tree and canary-laurel. When we consider that little if any change has occurred either in geographical conditions or in fauna or flora, within the historical period of some 10,000 years, it is difficult to assign the time which would be sufficient to bring about such changes by any known natural causes. And yet it comprises only a portion of the glacial period, for after this inter-glacial period had lasted for an indefinite time the climate again became cold, and culminated in a second glaciation, which, if not equal to the first, was still of extreme severity, and brought back ice-caps and glaciers almost to their former limits, passing away slowly and with several vicissitudes and alternate retreats and advances.

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