The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-07 00:00:00

swpep across the ever-changing surface of the earth
revealing to us the height of the land, the depth of
the sea, the quality of the air, the course of the
rivers, the extent of the forest, the system of life
and death—yes, the growth, decay, and death of
individuals, the beginning and ending of races, of
many successive races of plants and animals, in
seas now dried, on sand-banks now raised into
mountains, on continents now sunk beneath the
waters. Had that series a beginning ? Was the
earth ever uninhabited, after it became a globe
turning on its axis and revolving round the sun ?
Was there ever a period since land and sea were
separated—a period which we can trace—when the
land was not shaded by plants, the ocean not alive
with animals ? The answer, as it comes to us from
the latest observation, declares that in the lowest
deposits of the most ancient seas in the stratified
crust of the globe, the monuments of life remain.
They extend to the earliest sediments of water, now
in part so changed as to appear like the products of
fire. What life ? Only the simpler and less specially
organised fabrics have as yet rewarded research
among these old Laurentian rocks—only the aggre-
gated structures of foraminifera have been found in
what, for the present at least, must be accepted as
the first deposits of the oldest sea. The most ancient
of all known fossils, the Eozoon Canadense of Sir
W. Logan, is of this low, we may say lowest, type
of animal organisation. Then step by step we are
guided through the old Cambrian and Silurian sys-
tems rich in trilobites and brachiopoda, the delights
of Salter and Davidson ; with Agassiz and Miller
and Egerton we read the history of the strange old
fishes of the Devonian rocks ; Brongniart and Gop-
pert and Dawson and Binney and Hooker unveil
the mystery of the mighty forests now converted to
coal ; Mantell and) wen and Huxley restore for us
the giant reptiles of the lias, the oolite, and the
wealden ; Edwards and Wright almost revive the
beauteous corals and echinodermata ; which with all
the preceding tribes have come and gone before the
dawn of the later periods, when fragments of mam-
moths and hippopotami were buried in caves and
river sediments to reward the researches of Cuvier
and Buckland, Prestwich and Christy, Lartet and
Falconer. And what is the latest term in this long
series of successive existence ? Surely the monu-
ments of ever advancing art—the temples whose
origin is in caverns of the rocks ; the cities which
have taken the place of holes in the ground, or heaps
of stones and timber in a lake ; the ships which have
outgrown the canoe, as that was modelled from the
floating trunk of a tree, are sufficient proof of the
late arrival of man upon the earth, after it had un-
dergone many changes and had become adapted to
his physical, intellectual, and moral nature. Com-
pared with the periods which elapsed in the accom-
plishment of these changes, how short is the date of
those yet standing monoliths, cromlechs, and circles
of unhewn stone which are the oldest of human
structures raised in Western Europe, or of those
more regular fabrics which attest the early impor-
tance of the monarchs and people of Egypt, Assy-
ria, and some parts of America. Yet tried by monu-
ments of natural events which happened within the
age of man, the human family is old enough in
Western Europe to have been sheltered by caverns
in the rocks, while herds of reindeer roamed in
Southern France, and bears and hyienas were deni-
zens of the South of England. More than this, re-
mains of the rudest human art ever seen are cer-
tainly found buried with and are thought to belong
to races who lived contemporaneously with the
mammoth and rhinoceros, and experienced the cold
of a Gallic or British winter, from which the woolly
covering of the wild animals was a fitting protec-
tion. Our own annals begin with the Belts, if,
indeed, we are entitled to call by that historic name
the really two separate nations—Belgian, Iberian,
and Teutonic—whom the Roman writers re-
cognise as settlers in Britain, settlers among a
really earlier family, our rudest and oldest
forefathers, who may have been, as they thought
themselves to be, the primitive people of the land.
But beyond the KEXrai, who occupied the sources
of the Danube and the slopes of the Pyrenees, and
were known to Rome in later days, there was pre-
sent to the mind of the father of Grecian his-
tory a still more western race, the Cynetm,
who may, perhaps, be supposed the very
earliest people of the extreme west of the
continent of Europe. Were those the people,
the first poor pilgrims from the East, whose foot-
steps we are slowly tracing in the valleys of Picardy
and the south of England, if not on the borders of
the lakes of Switzerland ? Arc their kindred still
to be found among the Rhcetic Alps and the Astu-
rian cliffs, if not amid the wilds of Connemara,
pressed into those mountainous recesses by the
legions of Rome, the spear of the Visigoth, and the
sword of the Saxon ? Or must we regard them as
races of an earlier type, who had ceased to chip
flints before the arrival of Saxon or Goth, or Kelt
or Cynetian? These questions of romantic interest
in the study of the distribution and languages of the
families of man are part of a large circle of inquiry
which finds sympathy in several of our sections,
especially those devoted to zoology, physiology, and
ethnology. Let us not expect or desire for them a
very quick, or, at present, a very definite settle-
ment. Deep shadows have gathered over all the
earlier ages of mankind, which, perhaps, still longer
periods of time may not avail to remove. Yet le

us not undervalue the progress of ethnological in-
quiry, nor fail to mark how, within the period to
which our recollections cling, the revelations of
early Egypt have been followed by a chronology
of the ancient kingdoms on the Tigris and Euphrates
through the same rigorous study of language. Thus
has our Rawlinson added another page to the bril-
liant discoveries of Young and Champollion, Lepsius
and Rosellini. Nor, though obtained in a different
way, must we forget the new knowledge of a people
nearer home, which the philosophic mind of Keller
has opened to us among his native mountains.
There, on the borders of the Alpine lakes, before
the great Roman General crossed the Rhone, lived
a people older than the llelvetians, whose rude
lives, passed in hunting and fishing, were neverthe-
less marked by many of the inventions which every-
where, even in the most unfavourable situations,
accompany the least civilised of mankind. Im-

plements of stone and pottery of the rudest sor

belong to the earliest of these people ; while

ornamented weapons of war, and innumerable

other fabrics in that metal, appear about the
later habitations, and correspond probably to the
period of the true Helvetii, who quitted their
home and contended with Csar for richer settle-
ments in Gaul. The people of whom these are the

traces on almost every lake in Switzerland are- re-
cognised as well as jn the ancient lake basins of

Lombardy and among the Tyrolean Alps, and
farther on the north side of the mountains ; and
probably fresh discoveries may connect them with
the country of the Sarmatians and the Scythians.
Thus at length is fairly opened, for archeology and
paleontology to read, a new chapter of the world's
history, which begins in the pleistocene periods of
geology and reaches to the pre-historic ages of man.
Did our ancestors really contend, as the poets
fancied, with stones and clubs against the lion and
the rhinoceros, and thus expel them from their
native haunts, or have they been removed by change
of Climate or local physical conditions?
eteinne Was the
Western
the hyzenaand the element only pos-
siblewas
this
period
Europesaestreinrouodw belongs
l
there such
later time for theoeflekh,o.nts to Africa or India? And
reindeer,g
d
guolcxae reduced
which
undoubtedly roamed over the iiallns ofra
andihni c ha
France ? If we think so, what a
vista of long dura-
tion stretches before us, for no such changes
of
climate can be supposed to have occurred except as
the effect of great physical changes, requiring a
lapse of many thousands of years ! And, though
we may think such changes of climate not proved,
and probably careful weighing of evidence may jus-
tify our disbelief, still, if the valleys in Picardy have

, .
been excavated since the deposit of the gravel of St.

Acheul, and the whole face of the country has been

altered about the caverns of Torquay since they

received remains of animals and traces of man—

how can we - admit these facts and yet refuse the
time required for their accomplishment ? First, let
be sure of the facts, and especially of that main
fact upon which all the argument involving im-
mensity of time really turns—viz., the contempo-
raneous ,existence of man with the mammoth of

the plains and the bear of the caverns. The re-
mains of men are certainly buried with those of
extinct quadrupeds ; but did they live in the same
days, or do we see relics of different periods
gathered into one locality by natural processes of
a later date, or confused by the operations of
men ? Before replying finally to these questions,
further researches of an exact kind are desirable,
and the association has given its aid towards them,
both in- respect to the old cavern of Kent's Hole and
the newly opened fissure of Gibraltar, from which
we expect great results, though the best of our
labourers has ceased from his honourable toil.
When these and many other researches are com-
pleted, some future Lyell, if not our own great geo-
logist, may add some fresh chapters to the " An-
tiquity of Man." In judging of this antiquity, in
counting the centuries which may have elapsed since
smoothed flints fitted with handles of wood were
used as chisels and axes by the earliest people of
Scandinavia or Helvetia, and flakes of flint were
employed to cleanse the skins of the reindeer in the
caves of the Dordogne, or stronger tools 'broke up
the ice in the valley of the Somme, we must be care-
ful not to take what is the mark of low civilisation
for the indication of very remote time. In every
country, among every race of men, such rude wea-
pons are used now, or were used formerly. On the
banks of the Ohio, no less than on the English hills,
mounds of earth, rude pottery, and stone weapons
occur in abundance, and indicate similar wants,
contrivances, customs, ideas, in different races of
men living in different periods. Even-when in the
same country, as in Switzerland, or England, or
Denmark, successive deposits of instruments of
stone, bronze, or iron ; successive burials of pines,
beeches, and oaks ; successively extinguished races
of elephants, elks, and reindeer give us a real scale
of elapsed time, it is one of which the divisions are
not yet valued in years or centuries of years. To-
ward a right judgment of the length of this scale of
human occupation two other lines of evidence may
be thought worthy of notice ; one founded on the
anatomical study of the remains of early .men, the
other on the laws of language. If the varieties of
physical structure in man, and the deviations of
language from an original type, be natural effects
of time and circumstance, the length of time may
be in some degree estimated by the- amount of
the diversities which are observed to have
happened, compared with the variation which
is now known to be happening. This process
becomes imaginary, unless we assume all mankind
to have had one local centre, and one original lan-
guage. Its results must be erroneous, unless we
take fully into account the superior fixity of lan-
guages which are represented in writing and the
greater tendency to diversity of every kind which
must have prevailed in early times, when geographi-
cal impediments were aggravated by dissocial habits
of life. It appears, however, certain that some dif-
ferences of language, organisation, and habits have
separated men of apparently unlike races during
periods longer than those which rest on historical
facts. Ever since the days of Aristotle the analogy
existing among all parts of the animal kingdom, and
in a general sense we may say among all the forms
of life, has become more and more the subject of
special study. Related as all living beings are to the
element in which they move and breathe, to the me-
chanical energies of nature which they employ or re-
sist, and to the molecular forces which penetrate and
transform them, some general conformity of struc-
ture, some frequentlyrecurring resemblance of func-
tion must be present, and cannot be overlooked. In
the several classes this analogy grows stronger, and
in the subdivisions of these classes real family affinity
is recognised. In the smallest divisions, which have
this family relation in the highest degree, there seem
to be a line which circumscribes each group, within
which variations occur, from food, exercise, climate,
and transmitted peculiarities. Often one specific
group approaches another, or several others, and a
question arises whether, though now distinct, or
rather distinguishable, they always have been so
from their beginning, or will be always so until their
disappearance. Whether what we call species are so
many original creations or derivations from a few
types or one type is discussed at length in the ele-
gant treatise of Darwin, himself a naturalist of emi-
nent rank. It had been often discussed before.
Nor will any one think lightly of such inquiries
who rembers the essay of Linnaeus, "Be Telluris
orbis incremento," or the investigations of Brown,
Pritchard, Forbes, Agassiz, and Hooker regard-
ing the local origin of different species, genera, and
families of plants and animals, both on the land
and in the sea. Still less will he be disposed to
undervalue its importance, when he reflects on the
many successive races of living forms more or less
resembling our existing quadrupeds, reptiles, fishes,
and mollusca which appear-to have occupied definite
and different parts of the depths of ancient time ;
as now the tiger and the jaguar, the cayman and
the gavial„ live on different parts of the terrestrial
surface. Is the living Elephant of Ceylon the lineal
descendant of that mammoth which roamed over
Siberia, and Europe, and North America, or of one
of those sub-Himalayan tribes which Dr. Falconer
has made known, or was it a species only in circum-
polar regions ? Can our domestic cattle, horses and
dogs, our beasts of chase and our beasts of prey, be
traced back to their source in older types, contem-
poraries of the urns, megaceros, and hyaena on the
plains of Europe ? If so, what range of variation
in structure does it indicate ? If not so, by what
characters are the living races separated from those
of earlier date ? Specific questions of this kind must
be answered before the general proposition that the
forms of life are indefinitely variable with time and
circumstance can even be examined by the light of
adequate evidence. That such evidence will be
gathered and rightly interpreted I, for one, neither
doubt nor fear. Having stated some of the more
important subjects considered by the association,
and the recommendations made by itin the cause of
science, the President concluded his address in these

terms :—'When more than 30 years ago, this Parlia-
ment of Science came into being, its first child-lan-

guage was employed to ask questions of nature ;
now, in riper years, it founds on the answers re-

ceived further. and more definite inquiries_ directed
to the same prolific source of useful knowledge. Of
researches in science completed, in progress, or in
beginning, each of our annual volumes contains some

300 or more passing notices, or full -and permanent
records. This digest and monument of our labour

is, indeed, in some respects incomplete, since
it does not always contain: the narrative
or the result of undertakings which we

started, or fostered, or sustained ; and I own to
having experienced on this account once or twice
a feeling of regret. But the regret was soon lost in

the gratification of knowing that other and equally
beneficial channels of publication had been found ;
and that by these examples it was proved how truly
the association kept to the real purpose of its foun-

dation, " the advancement of science," and how
heartily it rejoiced in this advancement without

looking too closely to its own share in the triumph.
Here, indeed, is the stronghold of the British Asso-
ciation. Wherever and by whatever means sound
learning and useful knowledge are advanced there
to us are friends. Whatever is privileged to step
beyond his fellows on the road of scientific dis-

covery will receive our applause, and, if need be,
our help. Welcoming and joining in the labour of
all, we shall keep our place among those who clear

the roads and remove the obstacles from the paths

of science ; and whatever be our own. success in the
rich fields which lie before us, however little we

may now know, we shall prove that in this our day
we knew at least the value of knowledge, and joined
hearts and hands in the endeavour to promote it.
The address was listened to with much attention
and frequently applauded. At its close a vote of
thanks was moved by Sir R. Murchison, seconded
by the Mayor,
and carried by acclamation.
TO-morrow the general business of the sections
will commence. On Saturday there are to bo
excursions to Warwick- and Stratford ; to Coventry
and Kenilworth ; to Worcester and Malvern ; and
a Severn Valley excursion in four sections—namely,
Wroxeter, Shrewsbury, and Buildwas Abbey ; the
Wrekin ; Wenlock, &c. ; Coalbrookdale, &c. At
this latter place the four sections are to meet and
take lunch with Mr. Maiir, at Buildwas Abbey. On
Thursday, Sept. 14, there is to be an excursion to
Dudley, and through the South Staffordshire iron
district, and to Cannock Chase. • All the principal