also exhumed from the diluvial drift, rude flint instruments are no
longer criteria for depressing the age of bones found with them.
Primordial man was everywhere a hunter: his teeth and stomach
are those of an omnivorous genus: his instincts still continue to be
essentially bellicose.
This is confirmed, whilst I am writing, by the following interesting
account of proceedings among men of science in England—-which
is inserted as received:
“A paper has also been read, in this section, by Mr. Vivian, of
Torquay, on “ the earliest traces of human remains in Kent’s Cavern,
especially flmt-knives and arrow-heads, beneath the stalagmitic
floor. The peculiar interest of this subject consisted in its being
the link between geology and antiquities; and the certainty afiorded,
by the condition in which the remains are found, of their relative
aSe> the successive deposits being sealed up in situ by the droppings
of carbonate of lime, which assume the form of stalagmite. The
sources from which the statements in the paper were obtained, were
principally the original manuscript memoir of the late Rev. J.
M Enery, E. G-. S., which is deplored by Professor Owen, in his
Fossil Mammalia, and by other writers, as lost to science; but which has
been recovered by Mr. Vivian, and was produced before the section:
also the report of the sub-committee of the Torquay ¡Natural Society,
and his own researches.
“We have not space for the interesting statements contained in
the paper, or the extracts which were read from the manuscript,
beyond the following brief summary of Mr. Vivian’s conclusions,
which were mainly in accordance with those of Mr. M’Enery. The
cavern is situated beneath a hill, about a mile from Torquay and
Babbeeombe, extending to a circuit of about 700 yards. It was first
occupied by the bear (ursus spelseus) and extinct hyena, the remains
of-which, the bones of elephants, rhinoceros, deer, &c., upon which
they preyed, were strewn upon the rocky floor. By some violent
and transitory convulsion, a vast amount of the soil of the surrounding
country was injected into the cavern, carrying with it the bones,
and burying them in its inmost recesSes. Immediately upon its
subsidence, the cavern appears to have been occupied by human
inhabitants, whose rude flint instruments are found upon the mud
beneath the stalagmite. A period then succeeded, during which the
cavern was not inhabited until about half of the floor was deposited,
when a streak containing burnt wood and the bones of the wild boar
and badger was deposited; and again the cave was unoccupied, either
by men or animals,—=the remaining portion of the stalagmite being,
both above and below, pure and unstained by soil or any foreign
matter. Above the floor have been found remains of Celtic, early
British and Roman remains, together with those of more modern
date. Among^the inscriptions is one of interest as connected with
the landing of William III. on the opposite side of the b a y ‘W-
Hodges, of Ireland, 1688.’
“ In the discussion which followed, and in which Sir Henry Raw-
linson the Secretary .of the Ethnological Society, and others, took
part, the position of the flints beneath the stalagmite seemed to be
admitted, although contrary to the generally received opinion of the
most eminent geologists,—thus carrying back the first occupation
of Devon to very high antiquity, but not such as to be at variance with
Scriptural chronology: [!] the deposit of stalagmite being shown to
have been much more rapid at those periods when the cavern was not
inhabited, by the greater discharge of carbonic acid gas: Without
attempting to affix with any certainty more than a relative date to
these several points, or forming a .Scriptural interpretation upon
natural phenomena, which, as Bacon remarked, too often produces
merely a false religion and a fantastic philosophy, Mr. Vivian;suggested
that there was reason for believing that the introduction of
the mud was occasioned, not by the comparatively tranquil Mosaic
Deluge, which spared the olive and allowed the ark to float without
miraculous interposition, but by the greater convulsion alluded to in
the first chapter [I presume this to be a misprint, for no Hebraist
can find such coincidence in the Text] of Genesis, which destroyed
the pre-existing races of animals—most of those in this cavern being
of extinct species—and prepared the earth for man and his contemporaries.”
324
There is yet another rather recent rumor of certain discoveries
reported by Professor Karnat, of human skulls mingled with osseous
vestiges of the mammoth period,325 in the Suabian Alps; but I have
not been able to obtain details. ¡Nevertheless, whilst the antiquity
of man m Europe begins to be borne otit on all sides, it is to be
regretted that these so-called negroid crania do not yet appear to
have.been scrutinized by special cranioscopists; who would probably
detect, in their prognathous conformation, not a negro type, but
that of some races of man of lower intellectual grade than occupy
Europe at this day. In the scale of progression, monkeys should,
in Europe also, have been precursors (as they were in America) of
interior races of mankind ; such as those we still encounter being
confined within the same tropical zones now-a-days co-inhabited
by the simiadce.
»» p0rid™.“ T™e3’” Ang- 12’ 1856—Brit. Assoc. Adv. Science, Cheltenham, Aug. 9.
Proceedings of the German Scientific Association; held at Tubingen, 1854.