The food of animals is specified at the close of the work of this day. The grant to man is every herb bearing seed, and every fruit-tree. That to the lower animals is more extensive—every green herb. This can not mean that every animal in the earth was herbivorous. It may refer to the group of animals associated with man in Eden, and this is most likely the intention of the writer; but if it includes the animals of the whole earth, we may be certain, from the express mention of carnivorous creatures in the work of the fifth and sixth days, that it indicates merely the general fact that the support of the whole animal kingdom is based on vegetation.

A most important circumstance in connection with the work of the sixth day is that it witnessed the creation both of man and the mammalia. A fictitious writer would probably have exalted man by assigning to him a separate day, and by placing the whole animal kingdom together in respect to time. He would be all the more likely to do this, if unacquainted, as most ignorant persons as well as literary men are, with the importance and teeming multitudes of the lower tribes of animals, and with the typical identity of the human frame with that of the higher animals. Moses has not done so, we are at liberty to suppose, because the vision of creation had it otherwise; and modern geology has amply vindicated him in this by its disclosure of the intimate connection of the human with the tertiary period; and has shown in this as in other instances that truth and not "accommodation" was the object of the sacred writer. While, as already stated, many existing species extend far back into the tertiary period, showing that the earth has been visited by no universal catastrophe since the first creation of mammals; on the other hand, we can not with certainty trace any existing species back beyond the commencement of the tertiary era. Geology and revelation, therefore, coincide in referring the creation of man to the close of the period in which mammals were introduced and became predominant, and in establishing a marked separation between that period and the preceding one in which the lower animals held undisputed sway. This coincidence, while it strengthens the probability that the creative days were long periods, opposes an almost insurmountable obstacle to every other hypothesis of reconciliation with geological science.

At the close of this day the Creator again reviews his work, and pronounces it good. Step by step the world had been evolved from a primeval chaos, through many successive physical changes and long series of organized beings. It had now reached its acme of perfection, and had received its most illustrious tenant, possessing an organism excelling all others in majesty and beauty, and an immaterial soul the shadow of the glorious Creator himself. Well might the angels sing, when the long-protracted work was thus grandly completed:

"Thrice happy man,
And sons of men, whom God hath thus advanced,
Created in his image, there to dwell
And worship him, and in reward to rule
Over his works in earth, or sea, or air,
And multiply a race of worshippers
Holy and just; thrice happy, if they know
Their happiness and persevere upright."

The Hebrew idea of the golden age of Eden is pure and exalted. It consists in the enjoyment of the favor of God, and of all that is beautiful and excellent in his works. God and nature are the whole. Nor is it merely a rude, unintelligent, sensuous enjoyment. Man primeval is not a lazy savage gathering acorns. He is made in the image of the Creator; he is to keep and dress his garden, and it is furnished with every plant good for food and pleasant to the sight. In the midst of our material civilization we need to disabuse ourselves of some prejudices before we can realize the fact that man, without the arts of life or any need of them, is not necessarily a barbarian or a savage. Yet even Adam must have been an agriculturist with strong and willing hands, and must have had some need of agricultural implements such as those with which the least civilized of his descendants have been wont to till the soil. Still, without art or with very little of it, he could enjoy all that is beautiful and grand in nature, and could rise from the observation of nature to communion with God. We need the more to realize this, inasmuch as there seems so strong a tendency to confound material civilization with higher culture, and to hold that man primeval must have been low and debased simply because he may have had no temples and no machinery. We must remember that he had nature, which is higher than fine art, and that when in harmony with his surroundings he may have had no need either of exhausting labor or of mechanical contrivances. Farther, in the contemplation of nature and in seeking after God, he had higher teachers than our boasted civilization can claim.

Alas for fallen man, with his poor civilization gathered little by little from the dust of earth, and his paltry art that halts immeasurably behind nature. How little is he able even to appreciate the high estate of his great ancestor. The world of fallen men has worshipped art too much, reverenced and studied God and nature too little. The savage displays the lowest taste when he admires the rude figures which he paints on his face or his garments more than the glorious painting that adorns nature; yet even he acknowledges the pre-eminent excellence of nature by imitating her forms and colors, and by adapting her painted plumes and flowers to his own use. There is a wide interval, including many gradations, between this low position and that of the cultivated amateur or artist. The art of the latter makes a nearer approach to the truly beautiful, inasmuch as it more accurately represents the geometric and organic forms and the coloring of nature; and inasmuch as it devises ideal combinations not found in the actual world; which ideal combinations, however, are beautiful or monstrous just as they realize or violate the harmonies of nature. It is only the highest culture that brings man back to his primitive refinement.

Art takes her true place when she sits at the feet of nature, and brings her students to drink in its beauties, that they may endeavor, however imperfectly, to reproduce them. On the other hand, the student of nature must not content himself with "writing Latin names on white paper," wherewith to label nature's productions, but must rise to the contemplation of the order and beauty of the Cosmos as a revelation of Divinity. Both will thus rise to that highest taste which will enable them to appreciate not only the elegance of individual forms, but their structure, their harmonies, their grouping and their relations, their special adaptation, and their places as parts of a great system. Thus art will attain that highest point in which it displays original genius, without violating natural truth and unity, and nature will be regarded as the highest art.

Much is said and done in our time with reference to the cultivation of popular taste for fine art as a means of civilization; and this, so far as it goes, is well; but the only sure path to the highest taste-education is the cultivation of the study of nature. This is also an easier branch of education, provided the instructors have sufficient knowledge. Good works of art are rare and costly; but good works of nature are everywhere around us, waiting to be examined. Such education, popularly diffused, would react on the efforts of art. It would enable a widely extended public to appreciate real excellence, and would cause works of art to be valued just in proportion to the extent to which they realize or deviate from natural truth and unity. I do not profess to speak authoritatively on such subjects, but I confess that the strong impression on my mind is that neither the revered antique models, nor the practice and principles of the generality of modern art reformers, would endure such criticism; and that if we could combine popular enthusiasm for art with scientific appreciation of nature, a new and better art might arise from the union.

I may appear to dwell too long upon this topic; but my excuse must be that it leads to a true estimate both of natural history and of the sacred Scriptures. The study of nature guides to those large views of the unity and order of creation which alone are worthy of a being of the rank of man, and which lead him to adequate conceptions of the Creator; but the truly wise recognize three grades of beauty. First, that of art, which, in its higher efforts, can raise ordinary minds far above themselves. Secondly, that of nature, which, in its most common objects, must transcend the former, since its artist is that God of whose infinite mind the genius of the artist is only a faint reflection. Thirdly, that pre-eminent beauty of moral goodness revealed only in the spiritual nature of the Supreme. The first is one of the natural resources of fallen man in his search for happiness. The second was man's joy in his primeval innocence. The third is the inheritance of man redeemed. It is folly to place these on the same level. It is greater folly to worship either or both of the first without regard to the last. It is true wisdom to aspire to the last, and to regard nature as the handmaid of piety, art as but the handmaid of nature.

Nature to the unobservant is merely a mass of things more or less beautiful or interesting, but without any definite order or significance. An observer soon arrives at the conclusion that it is a series of circling changes, ever returning to the same points, ever renewing their courses, under the action of invariable laws. But if he rests here, he falls infinitely short of the idea of the Cosmos, and stands on the brink of the profound error of eternal succession. A little further progress conducts him to the inviting field of special adaptation and mutual relation of things. He finds that nothing is without its use; that every structure is most nicely adjusted to special ends; that the supposed ceaseless circling of nature is merely the continuous action of great powers, by which an infinity of utilities are worked out—the great fly-wheel which, in its unceasing and at first sight apparently aimless round, is giving motion to thousands of reels and spindles and shuttles, that are spinning and weaving, in all its varied patterns, the great web of life.

But the observer, as he looks on this web, is surprised to find that it has in its whole extent a wondrous pattern. He rises to the contemplation of type in nature, a great truth to which science has only lately opened its eyes. He begins dimly to perceive that the Creator has from the beginning had a plan before his mind, that this plan embraced various types or patterns of existence; that on these patterns he has been working out the whole system of nature, adapting each to all the variety of uses by an infinity of minor modifications. That, in short, whether he study the eye of a gnat or the structure of a mountain chain, he sees not only objects of beauty and utility, but parts of far-reaching plans of infinite wisdom, by which all objects, however separated in time or space, are linked together.

How much of positive pleasure does that man lose who passes through life absorbed with its wants and its artificialities, and regarding with a "brute, unconscious gaze" the grand revelation of a higher intelligence in the outer world. It is only in an approximation through our Divine Redeemer to the moral likeness of God that we can be truly happy; but of the subsidiary pleasures which we are here permitted to enjoy, the contemplation of nature is one of the best and purest. It was the pleasure, the show, the spectacle prepared for man in Eden, and how much true philosophy and taste shine in the simple words that in paradise God planted trees "pleasant to the sight," as well as "good for food." Other things being equal, the nearer we can return to this primitive taste, the greater will be our sensuous enjoyment, the better the influence of our pleasures on our moral nature, because they will then depend on the cultivation of tastes at once natural and harmless, and will not lead us to communion with and reverence for merely human genius, but will conduct us into the presence of the infinite perfection of the Creator.

The Bible knows but one species of man. It is not said that men were created after their species, as we read of the groups of animals. Man was made, "male and female;" and in the fuller details afterwards given in the second chapter—where the writer, having finished his general narrative, commences his special history of man—but one primitive pair is introduced to our notice. We scarcely need the detailed tables of affiliation afterward given, or the declaration of the apostle who preached to the supposed autochthones of Athens, that "God has made of one blood all nations," to assure us of the Scriptural unity of man. If, therefore, there were any good reason to believe that man is not of one but several origins, we must admit Moses to have been very imperfectly informed. Nor, on the other hand, does the Bible any more than geology allow us to assign a very high antiquity to the origin of man relatively to that of the earth on which he dwells. The genealogical tables of the Bible may admit of some limits of difference of opinion as to the age of the human world or æon, and also of that of the deluge, from which man took his second point of departure; but they do not allow us to put the origin of man farther back than that of the present or modern condition of our continents and the present races of animals. They therefore limit us to the modern or quaternary period of geology. The question of man's antiquity, so much agitated now, demands, however, a separate and careful consideration; but we must first devote a few pages to the simple statements of the Bible respecting the Sabbath of creation and its relation to human history.

CHAPTER XII.

THE REST OF THE CREATOR.

Science in this well accords with Scripture. No proof exists of the production of a new species since the creation of man; and all geological and archæological evidence points to him and a few of the higher mammals as the newest of the creatures. There is, on the other hand, good evidence that several species have become extinct since his creation. Those who believe in the continuous evolution of animals and men, it is true, can see no actual termination of the process with the introduction of man; but even they see that the appearance of a rational and moral being at least changes the nature and order of the development. Nor can they doubt that man is the last born of nature, and that the whole animal creation is crowned by him as its capital or topmost pinnacle. The later speculators on this subject have never reached any truth beyond that long ago stated by the lamented Edward Forbes—a most careful observer and accurate reasoner on the more recent changes of the earth's surface. He infers, from the distribution of species from their centres of creation, that man is the latest product of creative power; or, in other words, that none of those species or groups of species which he had been able to trace to their centres, or the spots at which they probably originated, appear to be of later or as late origin as man. "This consideration," he says, "induces me to believe that the last province in time was completed by the coming of man, and to maintain an hypothesis that man stands unique in space and time, himself equal to the sum of any pre-existing centre of creation or of all—an hypothesis consistent with man's moral and social position in the world."

The seventh day, then, was to have been that in which all the happiness, beauty, and perfection of the others were to have been concentrated. But an element of instability was present in the being who occupied the summit of the animal scale. Not regulated by blind and unerring instincts, but a free agent, with a high intellectual and moral nature, and liable to be acted on by temptation from without; under such influence he lost his moral balance in stretching out his hand to grasp the peculiar powers of Deity, and fell beyond the hope of self-redemption—perpetuating, by one of those laws which regulate the transmission of mixed corporeal and spiritual natures, his degradation to every generation of his species. And so God's great work was marred, and all his plans seemed to be foiled, when they had just reached their completion. Thus far science might carry us unaided; for there is not a true naturalist, however skeptical as to revealed religion, who does not feel in his inmost heart the disjointed state of the present relations of man to nature; the natural wreck that results from his artificial modes of life, the long trains of violations of the symmetry of nature that follow in the wake of his most boasted achievements. But here natural science stops; and just as we have found that, in tracing back the world's history, the Bible carries us much farther than geology, so science, having led us to suspect the fallen state of man, leaves us henceforth to the teaching of revelation. And how glorious that teaching! God did not find himself baffled—his resources are infinite—he had foreseen and prepared for all this apparent evil; and out of the moral wreck he proceeds to work out the grand process of redemption, which is the especial object of the seventh day, and which will result in the production of a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. In the seventh, as in the former days, the evening precedes the morning. For four thousand years the world groped in its darkness—a darkness tenanted by moral monsters as powerful and destructive as the old pre-Adamite reptiles. The Sun of Righteousness at length arose, and the darkness began to pass away; but eighteen centuries have elapsed, and we still see but the gray dawn of morning, which we yet firmly believe will brighten into a glorious day that shall know no succeeding night. [100]

The seventh day is the modern or human era in geology; and, though it can not yet boast of any physical changes so great as those of past periods, it is still of much interest, as affording the facts on which we must depend for explanations of past changes; and as immediately connected in time with those later tertiary periods which afford so many curious problems to the geological student. The actual connection of the human with preceding periods is still involved in some obscurity; and, as we shall see, there has recently been a strong tendency to throw back the origin of man into prehistoric ages of enormous length, on grounds which are, however, much less certain than is commonly imagined. This question we have to examine; but before entering upon it may shortly sketch the actual import of the statements of the Hebrew Scriptures respecting what may be called the prehistoric duration of the human species. This is the more necessary, as the most crude notions seem very widely to prevail on the subject. I shall, therefore, in this place notice some general facts deducible from the Bible, and which may be useful in appreciating the true relation of the human era to those which preceded it. It will be understood that I shall endeavor merely to present a picture of what the Bible actually teaches, and which any one can verify by reading the book of Genesis.

1. The local centre of creation of the human species, and probably of a group of creatures coeval with it, was Eden; a country of which the Scriptures give a somewhat minute geographical description. It was evidently a district of Western Asia; and, from its possession of several important rivers, rather a region or large territory than a limited spot, such as many, who have discussed the question of the site of Eden, seem to suppose. In this view it is a matter of no moment to fix its site more nearly than the indication of the Bible that it included the sources and probably large portions of the valleys of the Tigris, the Euphrates, and perhaps the Oxus and Jaxartes. Into the minor difficulties respecting the site of Eden it would be unprofitable to enter, and it will matter little if we accept that view, which, however, I think less probable, that it was placed in the lower part of the valley of the Euphrates. I may merely mention one particular of the Biblical description, because it throws light on the great antiquity of this geographical delineation, and has been strangely misconceived by expositors—the relation of those rivers to Cush or Ethiopia and Havilah, a tribal name derived from that of a grandson of Cush. On consulting the tenth chapter of Genesis, it will be found that the Cushites under Nimrod, very soon after the deluge, are stated to have pushed their migrations and conquests along the Tigris to the northward, and established there the first empire. It is probably this primitive Cushite empire, called Ethiopia in our translation, which in the epoch of the description of Eden occupied the Euphratean valley, and being bounded on one side by the river called Gihon, was thus believed to extend over the old site of Eden. Thus the Cush or Ethiopia of the description has no direct connection with the African Ethiopia, and speculations based on such a supposed connection are groundless. On the other hand this feature furnishes an interesting coincidence with other parts of Genesis, and throws light on many obscure points in the early history of man; and since this Cushite empire had perished even before the time of Moses, it indicates a still more ancient tradition respecting the primeval abode of our species.

2. Before the deluge this region must have been the seat of a dense population, which, according to the Biblical account, must have made considerable advances in the arts, and at the same time sunk very low in moral debasement. [101] Whether any remains of the central portions of this ancient population or its works exist will probably not be determined with absolute certainty till we have accurate geological investigations of the whole country in the neighborhood of the Caspian Sea and along the great rivers of Western Asia, though there is nothing unreasonable in the belief that some of the old prehistoric men whose remains are discovered in caves and river gravels in Europe may belong to the antediluvian race. Should such remains be found, we might infer, from the extreme longevity and other characteristics assigned to the antediluvians, that their skeletons would present peculiarities entitling them to be considered a well-marked variety of the human species, and this not of a low type of physical organization. We may also infer that the family of man very early divided into two races—one retaining in greater purity the moral endowments of the species, the other excelling in the mechanical and fine arts; and that there were rude and savage outlying communities of men then as at present. If the so-called palæolithic men of Europe are antediluvian, they were probably of such outlying tribes, and possibly of the mixed race which sprung up in the later antediluvian age, and who are described as mighty men physically, and men of violence. It would be quite natural that this intermixture of the Sethite and Cainite races should produce a race excelling both in energy and physical endowments—the "giants" that were in those days. [102] If any remains of the two central nations of the antediluvian period are ever discovered, we may confidently anticipate that the distinctive characteristics of these races may be detected in their osseous structures as well as in their works of art. Farther, it is to be inferred from notices in the fourth chapter of Genesis, that before the deluge there was both a nomadic and a settled population, and that the principal seat of the Cainite, or more debased yet energetic branch of the human family, was to the eastward of the site of Eden. No intimations are given by which the works of art of antediluvian times could be distinguished from those of later periods; but that curious summary of the treasures of antediluvian man contained in the notice that the land of Havilah produced gold and agate and pearl (Gen. ii., 12) would lead us to believe that the early antediluvian age was on the whole an age of stone, in which flint for weapons, and gold and shell wampum for ornaments, were the leading kinds of wealth. On the other hand, the notices of antediluvian metallurgy, and the building and construction of the ark, would lead us to infer that the later antediluvians had attained to much perfection in some constructive arts—a conclusion which harmonizes with the otherwise inexplicable perfection of such art soon after the deluge, as evidenced not only by the story of Babel, but also by the early works of the Assyrians and Egyptians.

3. When the antediluvian population had fully proved itself unfit to enter into the divine scheme of moral renovation, it was swept away by a fearful physical catastrophe. The deluge might, in all its relations, furnish material for an entire treatise. I may remark here, as its most important geological peculiarity, that it was evidently a local convulsion. The object, that of destroying the human race and the animal population of its peculiar centre of creation, the preservation of specimens of these creatures in the ark, and the physical requirements of the case, necessitate this conclusion, which is now accepted by the best Biblical expositors, [103] and which inflicts no violence on the terms of the record. Viewed in this light, the phenomena recorded in the Bible, in connection with geological probabilities, lead us to infer that the physical agencies evoked by the divine power to destroy this ungodly race were a subsidence of the region they inhabited, so as to admit the oceanic waters, and extensive atmospherical disturbances connected with that subsidence, and perhaps with the elevation of neighboring regions. In this case it is possible that the Caspian Sea, which is now more than eighty feet below the level of the ocean, [104] and which was probably much more extensive then than at present, received much of the drainage of the flood, and that the mud and sand deposits of this sea and the adjoining desert plains, once manifestly a part of its bottom, conceal any remains that exist of the antediluvian population. In connection with this, it may be remarked that, in the book of Job, Eliphaz speaks as if the locality of those wicked nations which existed before the deluge was known and accessible in his time:

"Hast thou marked the ancient way
Which wicked men have trodden,
Who were seized [by the waters] in a moment,
And whose foundations a flood swept away?"
—Job xxii., 15.

On comparing this statement with the answer of Job in the 26th chapter, verse 5th, it would seem that the ungodly antediluvians were supposed to be still under the waters; a belief quite intelligible if the Caspian, which, on the latest and most probable views of the locality of the events of this book, was not very remote from the residence of Job, [105] was supposed to mark the position of the pre-Noachic population, as the Dead Sea afterward did that of the cities of the plain. Some of the dates assigned to the book of Job would, however, render it possible that this last catastrophe is that to which he refers:

"The Rephaim tremble from beneath
The waters and their inhabitants.
Sheol is naked before him,
And destruction hath no covering."

The word Rephaim here has been variously rendered "shades of the dead" and "giants." It is properly the family or national name of certain tribes of gigantic Hamite men (the Anakim, Emim, etc.) inhabiting Western Asia at a very remote period; and it must here refer either to them or to the still earlier antediluvian giants. [106]

It is also an important point to be noticed here that the narrative of the deluge in Genesis is given as the testimony or record of an eye-witness, and is to be so understood; and that the terms of the record imply, not as usually held that all sorts of animals were taken into Noah's ark, but only a selection, the character of which is clearly indicated by a comparison of the five lists of animals given in the narrative. Bearing this in mind, and noticing that the writer tells of his own experience as to the rise of the water, the drifting of the ark, the disappearance of all visible shore, and the sounding fifteen cubits where a hill had before been, all the difficulties of the narrative of the deluge will at once disappear. These difficulties have in fact arisen from regarding the story as the composition of a historian, not as what it manifestly is, the log or journal of a contemporary, introduced with probably little change by the compiler of the book.

After the deluge, we find the human race settled in the plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, attracted thither by the fertility of their alluvial soils. There we find them engaging in a great political scheme, no doubt founded on recollections of the old antediluvian nationalities, and on a dread of the evils which able and aspiring men would anticipate from that wide dispersion of the human race that appears to have been intended by the Creator in the new circumstances of the earth. They commenced accordingly the erection of a city or tower at Babel, in the plain of Shinar, to form a common bond of union, a great public work that should be a rallying-point for the race, and around which its patriotism might concentrate itself. The attempt was counteracted by an interposition of divine Providence; and thenceforth the diffusion of the human race proceeded unchecked, carrying with it everywhere the memory of the celebrated tower, which perpetuated itself not only in the mounds of Assyria and Babylon and the pyramids of Egypt, but in the teocallis and temple mounds of the New World. The Babel enterprise is in fact the first recorded development of that mound-building instinct which the earlier races everywhere evince, and which has been a distinguishing characteristic more especially of the Cushite or Turanian race, and has apparently made them the teachers of constructive arts to all other peoples. Perhaps a dread of the total decay and loss of the surviving antediluvian arts in construction and other matters may have been one impelling motive to the building of Babel. Perhaps it was connected with the communistic ideas of the Turanian race, and their conflict with the patriarchal habits of the Semites. Out of the enterprise at Babel, however, arose a new type of evil, which, in the forms of military despotism, the spirit of conquest, hero-worship, and the alliance of these influences with literature and the arts, has been handed down through every succeeding age to our own time. The name of Nimrod, the son of Cush, has been preserved to us in the Bible, and also apparently in the tablets and inscriptions of Assyria, as the founder of the first despotism. This bold and ambitious man, subsequently deified under different names, established a Hamite or Turanian empire, which appears to have extended its sway over the tribes occupying Southwestern Asia and Northeastern Africa, everywhere supporting its power by force of arms, and introducing a debasing polytheistic hero-worship, and certain forms of art probably derived from antediluvian times. The centre of this Cushite empire, however, gave way to the rising power of Assyria or the Ashurite branch of the sons of Shem, at a period antecedent to the dawn of profane history, except in its mythical form; and when the light of secular history first breaks upon us, we find Egypt standing forth as the only stable representative of the arts, the systems, and the superstitions of the old Cushite empire, of which it had been the southern branch; while other remnants of the Hamite races, included in the empire of Nimrod, were scattered over Western Asia, and, migrating into Europe, with or after the ruder but less demoralized sons of Japheth, carried with them their characteristic civilization and mythology, to take root in new forms in Greece and Italy. [107] Meanwhile the Assyrian and Persian (Elamite) races were growing in Middle Asia, and probably driving the more eastern remnants of the Nimrodic empire into India, borrowing at the same time their superstitions and their claims to universal dominion. These views, which I believe to correspond with the few notices in the Bible and in ancient history, and to be daily receiving new confirmations from the investigations of the ancient Assyrian monuments, enable us to understand many mysterious problems in the early history of man. They give us reason to suspect that the principle of the first empire was an imitation of the antediluvian world, and that its arts and customs were mainly derived from that source. They show how it happens that Egypt, a country so far removed from the starting-point of man after the deluge, should appear to be the cradle of the arts, and they account for the Hamite and perhaps antediluvian elements, mixed with primeval Biblical ideas, as the cherubim, etc., in the old heathenism of India, Assyria, and Southern Europe, and which they share with Egypt, having derived them from the same source. They also show how it is that in the most remote antiquity we find two well-developed and opposite religious systems; the pure theism of Noah, and those who retained his faith, and the idolatry of those tribes which regarded with adoring veneration the objects and stages of the creative work, the grander powers and objects of nature, the mighty Cainites of the world before the flood, and the postdiluvian leaders who followed them in their violence, their cultivation of the arts, and their rebellion against God. These heroes were identified with imaginative conceptions of the heavenly bodies, animals, and other natural objects, associated with the fortunes of cities and nations, with particular territories, and with war and the useful arts, transmitted under different names to one country after another, and localized in each; and it is only in comparatively modern times that we have been able to recognize the full certainty of the view held long since by many ingenious writers, that among the greater gods of Egypt and Assyria, and of consequence among those also of Greece and Rome, were Nimrod, Ham, Ashur, Noah, Mizraim, and other worthies and tyrants of the old world; and to suspect that Tubalcain and Naamah, and other antediluvian names, were similarly honored, though subsequently overshadowed by more recent divinities. The later Assyrian readings of Rawlinson, Hincks, and the lamented George Smith, and the more recent works on Egyptian antiquities, are full of pregnant hints on these subjects. It would, however, lead us too far from our immediate subject to enter more fully into these questions. I have referred to them merely to point out connecting-links between the secular and sacred history of the earlier part of the human period, as a useful sequel to our comparison of the latter with the conclusions of science, and as furnishing hints which may guide the geologist in connecting the human with the tertiary period, and in distinguishing between the antediluvian and postdiluvian portions of the former.

It may be said, however, that all this Biblical history, however it may accord with the little that remains to us of the written annals of early Oriental nations, is entirely at variance with those modern archæological discussions which point to an immense antiquity of the human race, and to a primitive barbarism out of which all human culture was little by little evolved; and which results of archæological investigation, while contradictory to the Hebrew Scriptures, are entirely in accord with the evolutionist philosophy. The prominence now given to such views as these renders it necessary that we should denote a special chapter to their discussion.

CHAPTER XIII.

UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

Fortunately, however, the greater weight of biological and archæological evidence is here on the side of the Bible, and philology comes in with strong corroborative proof. But just as the orthodox theologian is beginning to congratulate himself on the aid he has thus received, some of his new friends gravely tell him that, in order to maintain their view, it is necessary to believe that man has resided on earth for countless ages, and that it is quite a mistake to suppose that his starting-point is so recent as the Mosaic deluge. Nay, some very rampant theorists of some ethnological schools try to pierce Moses and his abettors with both horns of the dilemma at once, maintaining that men may be of different species, and yet may have existed for an enormous length of time as well. The recent prevalence of theories of evolution has, however, thrown quite into the background the discussions formerly active respecting the unity of man, but has, along with geological and archæological discovery, given increased prominence to those relating to the date of the origin of our species and the manner of its introduction.

The Bible gives us a definite epoch, that of the deluge, about 2000 to 3000 B.C., for all existing races of men; but this, according to it, was only the second starting-point of humanity, and though no family but that of Noah survived the terrible catastrophe, it would be a great error to suppose that nothing antediluvian appears in the subsequent history of man. Before the deluge there were arts and an old civilization, extending over at least two thousand years, and after the deluge men carried with them these heirlooms of the old world to commence with them new nations. This has been tacitly ignored by many of the writers who underrate the value of the Hebrew history. It may be as well for this reason to place, in a series of propositions, the principal points in Genesis which relate to the questions now before us.

1. Adam and Isha, the woman, afterward called Eve (Life-giver), in consequence of the promise of a Redeemer, commenced a life of husbandry on their expulsion from Eden, which, on the ordinary views of the Bible chronology, may be supposed to have occurred from 4000 to 5000 years before the Christian era; and during the lifetime of the primal pair, the sheep, at least, was domesticated. The Bible, of course, knows nothing of the imaginary continent of Lemuria, in which, according to some hypotheses, men are supposed to have had their birth from apes. A few generations after, in the time of Lamech, cattle were domesticated; and the metals copper and iron were applied to use—the latter probably meteoric iron; and hence, it may be, the Hindoo and Hellenic myths of Twachtrei and Hephæstos in connection with the thunderbolt. We learn, however, incidentally, as already mentioned, in the description of Eden in Genesis, chapter 2d, that there was a previous stone age, in which "flint, pearls or shell beads, and stream-gold" were the chief treasures of man, for this is implied in the "gold, bedolach, and onyx" of the land of Havilah. It is certain also, from the discoveries made in Assyria, on the site of Troy, and elsewhere, that the use of stone implements continued in Western Asia long after the deluge. In the time of Noah the distinction of clean and unclean beasts, and the taking of seven pairs of certain beasts and birds into the ark, imply that certain mammals and birds were domesticated. [108]

2. Before the flood, as already remarked, there was a division of man into two nationalities or races; and there was a citizen, an agricultural, a pastoral, and a nomadic population. Farther, the remarkable progress in the arts implied in the building of such structures as the Tower of Babel, and other temple and palace mounds in Assyria, and of the pyramids of Egypt, within a few generations after the deluge, proves that a very advanced material civilization and great skill in constructive arts had been reached in antediluvian times. [109]

3. After the deluge, the arts of the antediluvians and their citizen life were almost immediately revived in the plain of Shinar; but the plans of the Babel leaders, like those of many others who have attempted to force distinct tribes into one nationality, failed. The guilt attributed to them probably relates to the attempt to break up the patriarchal and tribal organization, which in these early times was the outward form of true religion, in favor of some sort of national organization, not compatible with the extension of man immediately over the world, and tending to consolidation into dense communities. It may be a question here whether the tribal communism which has prevailed among the American Indians and other rude races was the primitive form of society which the Babel-builders essayed to change, or whether the Semitic patriarchal system had at first prevailed, and the Babel difficulties were connected with a conflict between this and communism or despotism, both new Turanian or Aryan introductions. In any case, Babel, and Babylon its successor, remain in the subsequent Biblical literature as types of the God-defying and antichristian systems that have succeeded each other from the time of Nimrod to this day.

4. The human race was scattered over the earth in family groups or tribes, each headed by a leading patriarch, who gave it its name. First, the three sons of Noah formed three main stems, and from these diverged several family branches. The ethnological chart in the 10th chapter of Genesis gives the principal branches under patriarchal and ethnic names but these, of course, continued to subdivide beyond the space and time referred to by the sacred writer. It is simply absurd to object, as some writers have done, to the universality of the statements in Genesis, that they do not mention in detail the whole earth. They refer to a few generations only, and beyond this restrict themselves to the one branch of the human family to which the Bible principally relates. We should be thankful for so much of the leading lines of ethnological divergence, without complaining that it is not followed out into its minute ramifications and into all history.

5. The tripartite division in Genesis x. indicates a somewhat strict geographical separation of the three main trunks. The regions marked out for Japheth include Europe and Northwestern Asia. The name Japheth, as well as the statements in the table, indicate a versatile, nomadic, and colonizing disposition as characteristic of these tribes. [110] The Median population, the same with a portion of that now often called Aryan, [111] was the only branch remaining near the original seats of the species, and in a settled condition. The outlying portions of the posterity of Japheth, on account of their wide dispersion, must at a very early period have fallen into comparative barbarism, such as we find in historic periods all over Western and Northern Europe and Northern Asia. Owing to their habitat, the Japhetites of the Bible include none of the black races, unless certain Indian and Australian nations are outlying portions of this family. The Shemite nations showed little tendency to migrate, being grouped about the Euphrates and Tigris valleys and neighboring regions. For this reason, with the exception of certain Arab tribes, they present no instances of barbarism, and generally retained a high cerebral organization, and respectable though stationary civilization, and they possess the oldest alphabet and literature. The posterity of Ham differs remarkably from the others. It spread itself over Southern, Central, and Eastern Asia, Southern Europe, and Northern Africa, and constitutes the stock alike of the Turanian and African races, as well as probably of the American tribes. It has all along displayed a great capacity for certain forms of art and semi-civilization, but has rarely risen to the level of the Shemite and Japhetite races. It established the earliest military and monarchical institutions, and presents at the dawn of history—in Assyria, in Egypt, and India—settled and arbitrary forms in politics and religion, of a character so much resembling that of an old and corrupt civilization that we can scarcely avoid supposing that Ham and his family had preserved more than any of the other Noachian races the arts and institutions of the old world before the flood. It certainly presents itself in early postdiluvian times as the first representative and teacher of art and material civilization. The Hamite race is remarkable for the early development of pantheism and hero-worship, and for the artificial character of its culture. It presents us with the darkest colors, and in the vast solitudes of Africa and Central Asia its outlying tribes must have fallen into comparative barbarism a few centuries after the deluge. It is farther to be observed that, according to the Bible, the Canaanites and other Hamite nations spoke languages not essentially different from those of the Shemites, while the Japhetite nations were to them barbarians—"a nation whose tongue thou shalt not understand." There was, too, at the date of the dispersion of Babel, already a distinction of tongues within each of the great races of men.

6. All the divisions of the family of Noah had from the first the domesticated animals and the principal arts of life, and enjoyed these in a national capacity so soon as sufficiently numerous. The more scattered tribes, wandering into fresh regions, and adopting the life of hunters, lost the characteristics of civilization, and diverged widely from the primitive languages. We should thus have, according to the Hebrew ethnology, a central area presenting the principal stems of all the three races in a permanently civilized state. All around this area should lie aberrant and often barbarous tribes, differing most widely from the original type in the more distant regions, and in those least favorable to human health and subsistence. In these outlying regions, secondary centres of civilization might grow up, differing from that of the primitive centre, except in so far as the common principles of human nature and intercommunication might prevent this. All these conclusions, fairly deducible at once from the Mosaic ethnology and the theory of dispersion from a centre, are perfectly in accordance with observed facts, though in absolute contradiction to prevalent ethnological conclusions, based on these facts in connection with theories of development.

A multitude of Bible notices might easily be quoted illustrative of these points, and also of the consistency of the Mosaic narrative with itself. One of them may suffice here. Abraham, who is said by the Jews to have been contemporary with Shem, as Menes by the Egyptians with Ham, at least lived sufficiently near to the time of the rise of the earliest nations to be taken as an illustration of this primitive condition of society. He was not a patriarch of the first or second rank, like Ham or Mizraim or Canaan, but a subordinate family leader several removes from the survivors of the deluge. Yet his tribe increases in comparatively few years to a considerable number. He is treated as an equal by the monarchs of Egypt and Philistia. He defeats, with a band of three or four hundred retainers, a confederacy of four Euphratean kings representing the embryo state of the Persian and Assyrian empires, and already relatively so strong that they have overrun much of Western Asia. All this bespeaks in a most consistent manner the rapid rise of many small nationalities, scattered over the better parts of wide regions, and still in a feeble condition, though inheriting from their ancestors an old civilization, and laying the foundations of powerful states. If we attach any historical value whatever to the narrative, it obviously implies that at a date of about two thousand years before Christ the regions afterward occupied by the oldest historic empires were still thinly peopled, and their dominant races little more than feeble tribes. This farther corresponds with the authentic history of all the ancient nations, however these may have been extended by previous mythical periods. About or shortly before the time of Abraham, Menes was draining for the first time the swamps of Egypt, Ninus or Nimrod was founding the Assyrian empire, the Phoenicians were founding Sidon, agriculture was being introduced into China, the Vedas were being written in India, the Persian monarchy was being founded; and, in short, all the historical nations of the East were originating, and this apparently by springing into being with an already formed civilization.

Such being the Hebrew account of the date and early history of man, it may be proper here to compare it with such deductions from archæological and geological investigation as may seem to conflict with it, and at the same time to make some comparisons with the Turanian and Aryan traditions and speculations as to human origins. The special lines of investigation important here are: 1. Early historical records other than the Bible; 2. The diversity of human languages; 3. The geological evidence afforded by remains of prehistoric men found in caverns and other repositories. The last of these is at present that which has attained the greatest development.

1. Early Human History.—Had the human race everywhere preserved historical records, we should have had some certain evidence as to the places and times of origination of its tribes and peoples. Unfortunately this has not been the case. All savage and barbarous races, and many of those now civilized, have lost all records of their early history. Most of the so-called ancient nations are comparatively modern, and their history after a very short course loses itself in uncertain tradition and mythical fancies. The only really ancient nations that have given us in detail their own written history are the Hebrews, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Hindoos, and the Chinese. The last people, though professedly very ancient, trace their history from a period of barbarism—a view confirmed by their physical characters and the nature of their civilization; and on this account, if no other, their history can not be considered as of much archæological value. According to their own records, their earliest authentic history goes back to about 2800 B.C., and was preceded by a prehistoric period of uncertain duration. The astronomical deductions of Schlegel, which would extend their history to 17,000 years, are evidently altogether unreliable. [112] The early Hindoo history is palpably fabulous or distorted, and has been variously modified and changed in comparatively modern times. There is one great and very ancient people—the Egyptian—evidently civilized from the beginning of all history, that have succeeded in transmitting to us, though only in fragments, their primeval history; and of late years constant additions have been made from inscribed tablets and monuments to our knowledge of the ancient history of the Assyrians and Chaldeans.

The Egyptian history has been gathered first from sketches by Greek travellers, and from fragments of the chronicles of Manetho, one of the later Egyptian priests; and, secondly, from the inscriptions deciphered on Egyptian monuments and papyri. It is still in a very fragmentary and uncertain state, but has been used with considerable effect to prove both the diversity of races of men and the pre-Noachic antiquity of the species. The Egyptian, in features and physical conformation, tended to the European form, just as the modern Fellahs and Berbers do; but he had a dark complexion, a somewhat elongated head and flattened lips, and certain negroid peculiarities in his limbs. His language combined many of the peculiarities of the Semitic, Aryan, and African tongues, indicating thereby great antiquity or else great intermixture, but not, as some ethnographers demand, both; most probably the former—the Egyptians being really the oldest civilized people that we certainly know, and therefore, if languages have one origin, likely to be near its root-stock.

The actual history of Egypt begins from Menes, the first human king, a monarch, or rather tribal chief, who took up his abode in the flats and fens of Lower Egypt, certainly not very long after the deluge. His name has been translated "one who walks with Khem," or Ham; one, therefore, who was contemporary with this great patriarch and god of the Egyptians, which will place his time within a few centuries of the Biblical flood. The date of Menes has been variously placed. In correction of the ordinary Hebrew chronology, we have the following attempts:

The truth may be somewhere near the mean of the shorter chronologies given in the list. [113] That of Bunsen is liable to very grave objections; more especially as he adds to it other views, altogether unsupported by historical evidence, which would carry back the deluge to 10,000 years B.C. It rests wholly on the chronology of Manetho, who lived 300 years B.C.; and who, even if the Egyptians then possessed authentic documents extending 3700 years before his time, may have erred in his rendering of them; and is farther liable to grave suspicions of having merely grouped the names on the monuments of his country arbitrarily in Sothic cycles. Farther, they rest on an interpretation of Manetho, which supposes his early dynasties to have been successive, while good reasons have been found to prove that many of them consist of contemporaneous petty sovereigns of parts of Egypt. The early parts of Manetho's lists are purely mythical, and it is impossible to fix the point where his authentic history commences. He copied from monuments which have no consecutive dates, the precise age of which could only be vaguely known even in his time, and which are different in their statements in different localities. It is only by making due allowance for these uncertainties that any historical value can be attached to these earlier dynasties of Manetho. Yet Bunsen has built on an uncertain interpretation of this writer, as handed down in a very fragmentary and evidently garbled condition, and on the equally or more uncertain chronology of Eratosthenes, a system differing from all previous belief on the subject, from the Hebrew history, and from all former interpretations of the monuments and Manetho. [114] Discarding, therefore, in the mean time, this date, and the still older one claimed by Mariette, [115] we may roughly estimate the date of Menes as 2000 to 2500 years B.C., [116] and proceed to state some of the facts developed by Egyptologists.

One of the most striking of these is the proof that Egypt was a new country in the days of Menes and several generations of his successors. The monuments of this period show little of the complicated idolatry, ritual, and caste system of later times, and are deficient in evidence of the refinement and variety of art afterward attained. They also show that these early monarchs were principally engaged in dyking, and otherwise reclaiming the alluvial flats; an evidence precisely of the same character with that which every traveller sees in the more recently settled districts of Canada, where the forest is giving way to the exertions of the farmer. Farther, in this primitive period, known as the "old monarchy," few domestic animals appear, and experiments seem to have been in progress to tame others, natives of the country, as the hyena, the antelope, the stork. Even the dog in the older dynasties is represented by one or at most two varieties, and the prevalent one is a wolfish-looking animal akin to the present wild or half-tamed dogs of the East. [117] The Egyptians, too, of the earlier dynasties, are more homogeneous in their appearance than those of the later, after conquest and migration had introduced new races; and the earliest monumental notice referring to Negro tribes does not appear until the 12th dynasty, about half-way between the epoch of Menes and the Christian era, nor does any representation of the Negro features occur until, at the earliest, the 17th dynasty. This allows ample time—one thousand years at the least—for the development, under abnormal circumstances and isolation, of all the most strongly marked varieties of man. Still Egypt, even under the old monarchy, presents evidence of the continuation of antediluvian culture. [118]

It is obvious, in short, that the whole aspect of early Egyptian history presents to us a people already civilized taking possession of that country at a period corresponding with that of the subsidence of the Noachian deluge, and not finding there any remains of older populations. Nor have any remains of such populations been found by modern investigation. [119]

In Assyria the results of the recent discoveries, so well known through many learned and popular works, strikingly confirm the Hebrew chronology. They indicate no slow emergence from barbarism, but show that in Assyria as in Egypt implements of stone and metal were used together by a primitive people, already far advanced in civilization; and the oldest historical names only carry us back to cities and sovereigns of the Abrahamic age, while the story of the primitive empire of Nimrod and the traditions of the deluge seem to have survived in more or less mythical legends. The earliest Assyrian monuments would seem to belong to a Turanian race, of which comparatively little is known, but which may correspond with the primitive Cushites of Biblical story. To these, it is true, Berosus attaches a fabulous antiquity; but this is not confirmed by the monuments. These, according to the latest facts disclosed by Smith, Rawlinson, and others, appear to fix a date of about 1800 B.C. for the foundation of the Assyrian monarchy proper, and the oldest previous date given by Assurbampal, who reigned about B.C. 668 to 626, gives 1635 years before his time, or say 2280 B.C., as the date of an Elamite king Kudarnankundi, who seems to be the leader of a primitive tribe, one of the oldest in the region, and who has been conjectured to have been the Chedorlaomer of Genesis, but was probably one of his predecessors.

We gather from the Assyrian annals that the early Turanian kings, while mound-builders like their kindred elsewhere, and acquainted with metals and with the cuneiform writing, yet constituted comparatively small nations, and were much occupied with hunting and other rude sports, and with predatory expeditions, so as to answer very nearly to the Biblical conception of the early Cushite kingdom of the valley of the Euphrates, which was probably in the same stage of culture with the nations that in a later period inhabited the valley of the Mississippi, and are known as the Alleghans.

In connection with the early history of man, much importance has been attached to the division of the early historic and prehistoric ages into the periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron, and of the former into a Palæolithic or ancient stone age, and a more modern or Neolithic stone age. It is plain, however, that too great importance has been attached to these distinctions, and that they express rather differences of circumstances and of culture than of age, so that they have really no bearing on the Biblical chronology.

If palæolithic or rudely chipped implements are the oldest known, as they not improbably were the first tools used by man, yet their use has extended in the case of rude nations all the way up to the present time; and in America and Northern Asia we know that their antiquity is but of yesterday, and that they were used with highly finished implements of bone, and of those softer stones that admit of being polished. No certain line can therefore be drawn even locally between a Neolithic and a Palæolithic period, especially since in localities where flint implements were extensively quarried and made, as on the banks of rivers in Northern France and Southern England, and in such places as "Grimes' Graves" and Cissbury in the latter country, where mines were sunk in the chalk for the extraction of flints, it necessarily happened that vast multitudes of unfinished or spoiled implements and weapons were left on the ground, while the better-formed specimens were for the most part taken away. This conclusion is amply supported by similar localities in America, where people well acquainted with many of the arts of life have left quantities of strictly palæolithic material. Wilson, Southall, and other writers have accumulated so many examples of this that I think the distinction of Palæolithic and Neolithic ages must now be given up by all investigators who possess ordinary judgment. A remarkable instauce is the celebrated "Flint ridge" of Ohio, which was a great quarry of flint for implements used by the ancient mound-builders, a highly civilized race, as well as by the modern Indians. Here are found countless multitudes of palæolithic flint implements of all the ordinary types, but which are merely the unfinished material of workers capable of producing the most exquisite implements. There can be scarcely a doubt that the palæolithic implements of the European gravels, in so far as they are the workmanship of man, are in like manner merely the relics of old flint quarries. [120]

Possibly a more accurate measurement of time for particular regions of the world might be deduced from the introduction of bronze and iron. If the former was, as many antiquarians suppose, a local discovery in Europe, and not introduced from abroad, it can give no measurement of time whatever. In America, as the facts detailed by Dr. Wilson show, while a bronze age existed in Peru, it was the copper age in the Mississippi Valley, and the stone age elsewhere; and these conditions might have co-existed for any length of time, and could give no indication of relative dates. On the other hand, the iron introduced by European commerce spread at once over the continent, and came into use in the most remote tribes, and its introduction into America clearly marks an historical epoch. With regard to bronze in Europe, we must bear in mind that tin was to be procured only in England and Spain, and in the latter in very small quantity; the mines of Saxony do not seem to have been known till the Middle Ages. We must further consider that tin ore is a substance not metallic in appearance, and little likely to attract the attention of savages; and that, as we gather from a hint of Pliny, it was probably first observed, in the West at least, as stream tin, in the Spanish gold washings. Lastly, when we place in connection with these considerations the fact that in the earliest times of which we have certain knowledge, the tin trade of Spain and England was monopolized by the Phoenicians, there seems to be a strong probability that the extension of the trade of this nation to the western Mediterranean really inaugurated the bronze period. The only valid argument against this is the fact that moulds and other indications of native bronze casting have been found in Switzerland, Denmark, and elsewhere; but these show nothing more than that the natives could recast bronze articles, just as the American Indians can forge fish-hooks and knives out of nails and iron hoops. Other considerations might be adduced in proof of this view, but our limits will not permit us to refer to them. The important questions still remain: When was this trade commenced, and how rapidly did it extend itself from the sea-coast across Europe? The British tin trade must have been in existence in the time of Herodotus, though his notion of the locality was not more definite than that it was in the extremity of the earth. The Phoenician settlements in the western Mediterranean must have existed as early as the time of Solomon, when "ships of Tarshish" was the general designation of seagoing ships for long voyages. How long previously these colonies existed we do not know; but considering the great scarcity and value of tin in those very ancient times, we may infer that perhaps only the Spanish, and not the British deposits were known thus early; or that the Phoenicians had only indirect access to the latter. Perhaps we may fix the time when these traders were able to supply the nations of Europe with abundance of bronze in exchange for their products, at, say 1000 to 1200 B.C., as the earliest probable period; and possibly from one to two centuries would be a sufficient allowance for the complete penetration of the trade throughout Europe. But of course wars or migrations might retard or accelerate the process; and there may have been isolated spots in which a partial stone period extended up to those comparatively recent times in which first the Greek trade, and afterward the entire overthrow of the Carthaginian power by the Romans, terminated forever the age of bronze and substituted the age of iron. This would leave, according to our ordinary chronologies, at least ten or fifteen centuries for the postdiluvian stone period in Europe and Western Asia, a time quite sufficient in our view for all that part of it represented by such monuments as the Danish shell-heaps or the platform habitations of the Swiss lakes; leaving the remains of the prehistoric caverns and river gravels for the antediluvian period. A few facts in illustration of these points, and also of the Biblical history, may be mentioned here.

We know perfectly that the early Chaldeans of the Euphratean valley were acquainted with the use of metals—bronze certainly, and at a very early date iron; yet flint knives and other implements of stone are found under circumstances which show that they were used in the palmy days of the Assyrian empire. The inhabitants of Egypt were acquainted with bronze and iron long before the date of the Exodus, yet the Egyptians used stone knives for some purposes up to a comparatively modern time. Joshua used stone knives for the purpose of circumcision; and according to Herodotus there were Ethiopians in the army of Xerxes who used stone-tipped arrows. If any antiquarian were to stumble on the "hill of the foreskins"—a mound under which were buried in all probability the multitudinous flint flakes used in the circumcision of the thousands of Israel—or the grave in which some of the Ethiopian auxiliaries of Xerxes were buried with their flint arrow-heads and javelins of antelopes' horn, how absurd would be the inference that these repositories were of the palæolithic age. Nay, so late as 1870 a traveller was informed that the Bagos, a people of Abyssinia, still made and used stone hatchets and flint knives. [121]

In Europe we find reason to believe that the Ligurians of Northwestern Italy were flint-folk of very rude type until they were conquered by the Gauls about 400 B.C. [122] Though the Gauls, Britons, and Germans of the age of Julius Cæsar had iron weapons, yet it is evident that the metal was very scarce, and that bronze was more common; and in confirmation of this it is found that in the trenches before Alize, the Alesia of Cæsar, where the final struggle of the Roman general with Vercingetorix took place, weapons of stone, bronze, and iron are intermixed. All over the more northern parts of Europe there is the best reason to believe that the use of stone and bronze continued to a much later period, and locally until long after the Christian era. It is clear that such facts as these must greatly modify our ideas of the probable age of the Swiss lake villages, and should induce the greatest caution in claiming any special antiquity for particular classes of implements.