The States and Union. [volume] (Ashland, Ohio) 1868-1872, 1871-10-18
The ORIGIN of Man,

The Rev. Canon Kingsley presided
at the inaugural meeting of the Dew.
enshire Association for the Advance
ment of Science. In the course of
his address the President said: "I
fully accept the immense antiquity of
ihe human race. I even accept as
possible the guest of a certain very
distinguished scientific friend of mine,
that before all is done we may stumble
yet upon the remains Of Silurian
man. But say, the older man proves
10 be, the more likely he is to have
changed meanwhile. AS for the Es-
: qufmaux-ffKe savagos- whose imple-
ments of flint or bone are found in
caves and river gravels. they may
have been the earliest human race
which appeared, or re-appeared, in
Europe, when it recovered from the
great catastrophe of the glacial epoch,
That, it seems to me, is all that we
can say of them AS for their being
the original type of man, as for our
being able to argue from their habits
what the habits of our remotest an
cestors, that [ must deny, as utterly
as l deny it of any and every savage
now existing.
tIn the first place, man, hairless,
feeble, and possessed of no natural
weapons, must have begun his career
in the tropics, probably in some part
Of the tropics where there were no
large or dangerous beasts. Of prey,
and no violent inclemencies of the
weather. In word, be must have
commenced his career, as Mr.. Darwin
avows. in some. earthly paradise. But
once being there, with food and COM
fort ready to his hand, he would stay
there as long as he could. The hun:
ters of reindeers, and bison, and rhin-
oceros, and mammoth, and the then,
barren moors of France, Belgium and
England, must have come thither
against their natural inclination. Not
of their own choice did they face the
lion, the bear. and the hyena, but be-.
cause they were driven north, as their
probable descendants, the Laplanders
and Esquimaux, the Samoiedes and
TUnggoes, have been driven north
ward since into the artic ice. II so,
they were probably of lower type
For it is a general rule that in the
extreme north and south of continents,
OF amid the most inclement mountain
ranges, the lower and older races Of a
country are to be found, Stronger :.
and more ceura geous invaders take
possession of the rich and warm low {.
lands, and drive them to the noun
tains or to the artic shores. / should
say, therefore, that the mere fact of
these poor people having pushed
northward is firm reason for supposing
that there were even then, down south
of them, strong and, it may be, civil
lied races, from the face of whom they
were fleeing, to take refuge among
the northern SHOWS. And it Is on the
ground of this very possibility that I
am led more and more to doubt
whether we can ever know anything
certainly about primeval man at all. :
For see: the more ancient you con-.
fess the human race to be, the more
time you allow for whole people to
have risen, become great, strong, civ
ilized and the more time, too, for
whole peoples to have fallen again,
and become weak, base, barbarous.
"For. civilization may fall as well as
rise. Those who talk of continual
progress upward in man forget how
many facts are against them. Has
Greece risen or fallen in the last two
thousand years? Has the whole
East risen or fallen in the last thou
sand years?- Has Spain risen or fall,
en- in the last two hundred years? In
America alone have not two great
civilizations, that of Mexico and Peru;
sunk into savagery again during the
last three hundred years? And how
many times may not the same thing
happened on the earth. If I am to
believe Gas 1 think we must belieye)
that the human race is of immense an
tiquity, then I shall see more likeli-.
hood, more reasonableness, in those
magnificent Arab legends 0f whole
dynasties of pre-Adamite sultans, and
all the gorgeous fables of vanished
greatness and glory OF which the east
is full, than in the theory that man
crawled on as savage, or semi-savagej
for countless ages.