a low type. When first looked at what little could be made out of it pointed to the conclusion that this ancient flemish race was somewhat like the Ethiop or negro. Some more fragments have been added to those on which Schmerling's observations were first made, a cast of the whole was submitted to Huxley who made a full report thereon quoted by Lyell. We will not if you please follow the professor through his admirable report. He pronounces the form to be dolicho-cephalic or longheaded, gives the measurements of the glabello-occipital line, longitudinal arc, &c., with all the care and accuracy one might expect from such a distinguished observer. My principal matter is with the fact that though the older it apparently belongs to a much higher class of head than either the men of the Neander Valley or the Danes of the Borreby mounds. It is as far in development above the australian skull as the Neander skull is below it. All this it may be observed is based upon the assumption that in these relics we have before us fair average samples of the people of that day, and not merely accidental departure from the ordinary type, such as we see daily in the very same race, who often differ as widely one from another as the Engis head from the german, a point on which I lay little stress myself, believing that the savage race and ape class differ much less from each other, in this way, than civilized races. We then conclude that so far as evidence before us goes that a higher class of men was succeeded by a race scarcely above the brutes, and Lyell warns us against "the expectation of always meeting with a lower type of human skull the older the formation in which it occurs," a view which is based on the theory of progressive development and may prove to be sound; "nevertheless we must remember that as yet we have no distinct geological evidence that the appearance of what are called the inferior races of mankind has always preceded in chronological order that of the higher races." But is there any reason even in this low formation of skull for concluding that this race of men were a stage between the ape and man? We are told that "it is now admitted that the differences between the brain of the highest races of men and that of the lowest, though less in degree are of the same order as those which separate the human from the simian brain, and the same rule holds good in regard to the shape of the skull." But if geology teaches such facts it simply leads men into a quicksand. No ape shapes a spear-head, or forms the rudest axe, spreads a pit-fall, kindles a fire, or weaves a garment. Still with these marks of greater craft it is only too doubtful if in many respects man stands as high as the ape in the scale of created beings. The name of savage but too often means the union of the worst features of the human race; the noble savage is a creature who maims and beats women, leaves the old to perish of hunger or strangles or drowns them, feeds on his fellow men, and looks upon murder, theft, treachery, and lies as feats worthy of a chief and a brave; a wretched gloomy thriftless and hopeless creature living like the wolf, dying like the worn-out beasts of prey, and if he believes in anything beyond this world, a prey to the most abject superstition. It is a most singular and interesting fact that these powerful races should have been succeeded by such a feeble little people as the lake dwarfs seem to have been, apparently a gentle inoffensive race, even below the little men of the age of bronze who succeeded and perhaps exterminated them. As we shall soon have to enter upon the history of the lake dwarfs I leave this part of the subject for the present. What is the age of the man of the flint weapon, the first dweller upon earth so far as we yet know? Sir Charles Lyell's opinion is most decidedly that man, notwithstanding the great distance of time at which he lived, has only been traced back to a period after the great winter. "One step at least," he says, "we gain by the Bedford sections which those of Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. They teach us that the fabrication of the antique tools and the extinct mammalia coeval with them were all post-glacial, or in other words posterior to the grand submergence of Central England beneath the waters of the glacial sea." In general we only track man to the boulder clay. Certainly had he been here when the great winter came, when the hour drew nigh which was to wrap the earth in one vast winding-sheet of snow and bury it beneath the thick-ribbed ice, when life in the beast and bird, in the tree and grass, was struck down as though a lava flood had swept over it, and every mound was crusted with the pale blue glaciers and every stream iron-bound in ice, his lot must have been most dreadful. Nothing now on earth could compare with it, not even the state of the hapless savages of Tierra del Fuego, who everlastingly starved with the cold of their horrible climate, shivering even in summer in the raw chilly breeze, covered with filth and vermin, " live in one of the most inhospit able climates in the world, without having sagacity enough to provide themselves with such conveniences. as might mitigate its severities, and render life in some measure more comfortable." "The very outcasts of humanity, amidst eternal fog and ice they gain their scanty and precarious living almost solely by preying on the raw shell-fish of those wintry coasts." How like the poet's dream of man in his native state. "To their supper fruits they fell, Nectarine fruits! which the compliant boughs On the soft downy bank damask'd with flowers." With the comfortable prospect of sleeping afterwards on the flowery couch, "Pansies, and violets, and asphodel, And hyacinths; earth's freshest softest lap." Lyell however is extremely cautious about drawing the conclusion that because we cannot trace man back beyond the great glacial period, he therefore did not exist. This mighty catastrophe, he justly argues, might have so utterly destroyed every trace of him that we might long seek for them in vain. He says, if there were a few wanderers over lands covered with glaciers, or over seas infested with icebergs, and if a few of them left their bones or weapons in moraines or in marine drift, the chances after the lapse of thousands of years of a geologist meeting with one of them must be infinitesimally small. Mr. Dawkins, in a paper read to the British Association, speaks of the bones of the lion and rhinoceros hemitachus being found in Wookey-Hole den along with flint and chert implements; both these creatures are pre-glacial. It would be indeed very premature to judge at present. Could we even carry man back to the days before the great winter, his time upon earth would be as yet but a span. But an attempt has been made to refer the appearance of man in one part of the globe, geologically speaking, at least much further back; and perhaps the strangest thing yet told of Australia is that she is now in a state much resembling that of parts of the secondary period, and that man is living there. "I believe," says the Reverend Julian E. Woods,* "that the present state of this part of Australia (the south) is very similar to what Europe was immediately after the second period, and that really in regard to the development of its fauna and flora this continent is far behind the rest of the world." I think if the author had compared it to England during part of the secondary period instead of after it, he would not in any way have strained the analogy. In the flora the correspondence to the secondary period is well marked. There are represented the Araucariæ, so common to this great era in Norfolk Island and Australia. There are found the Zamiæ, closely allied to species met with in secondary deposits.† Now, we know that man exists in Australia in a sad rude benighted state certainly, leading a precarious life at times, and never having too much to eat and drink, but still living pretty well upon the whole; and the very fact, says Mr. Woods, that man finds an easy and very comfortable subsistence in Australia which, whether my principle be admitted or not, is behind * Geological Observations in South Australia. |