Contemporary Literature [pp. 549-569]

1875.] CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE. 559
livery. Ten thousand copies have already been published. It is more fra~
mentary and miscellaneous, and, in our view, less adequate than the former.
In regard to each, we may corcfially adopt the judgment of Dr. Charles
Hodge, expressed in a letter to the author: "The first paper I think admirable; I do not see how it could be better; and the second, considering the
time you had at command, is all that could be expected. Both will do you
great credit, and the cause of truth great good."
The Recent Ongin of Man, as illustrated by Geology and the Modern
Science of Pre-historic Arch~oiogy. By JAMES C. SOUTHALL. Illustrated.
Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. London: Triibner & Co. 1875.
To surrender to the geologists and archaeologists the "antiquity " of man,
and to admit further, as they allege, that primeval man was a savage of
the lowest type~riginally, as some of them claim, a mute-is to surrender
the veracity of the book of Genesis, and at the same time our entire theology.
The scheme of redemption is based on the reality of the representations with
regard to the Terrestial Paradise and the fall, and pivots on the fact of the
descent of the whole human race from Adam, in whom all have fallen and
all have sinned. The primeval man of Genesis, moreover, enjoyed a life of
eight or nine hundred years, and no ingenuity can get rid of this plain statement (repeated so often) with regard to the longevity of the patriarchs.
Cain, moreover, the son of Adam, builds a city. In the eighth generation Jubal introduces instruments of music, and Tubal-cain works in brass
and iron. After the flood, Nimrod, in the third generation, builds the cities
of Babel, Erech, Accad and Calneh, all of which implies a very different
state of things from the primeval age as depicted in our modern works of
anthropology.
The volume before us is the first elaborate attempt to refute the conclusions which have been drawn by Sir C. Lyell, Sir J. Lubbock, M. E. Lartet,
Prof. Nilsson, and others, from the human relics found in the river gravels
and bone-caves of Europe, in the Swiss lake-dwellings, the Danish peat,
etc.
The author of the work before us reviews, in great detail, and in order, all
of the evidence on this subject which has accumulated during the past fifteen
or twenty years. He plants himself distinctly at the outset on the substantial correctness of the received biblical chrnno'~gy, and proceeds to discuss the
antiquity: I. Of the megalithic monuments of Europe; 2. Of the remains
found in the pile villages of the lakes of Switzerland, Italy, France, etc.; 3
Of the relics of stone and bronze found in the Danish peat; 4. Of the stone
and bone implements found in association with the remains of the great extinct animals (the mammoth, etc.) in the European bone-caves; 5. Of the
rude flint implements found in the same association in the ancent postglacial gravels of the valleys of the Somme, the Seine, the Thames, the
Tiber, etc.
Mr. Southall shows that the dolmens and tumuli and great stone circles of
England, France, Spain, North Africa, etc., come down in date to the tenth
Century of our era, and that most of them are post-Christian. The stone im