rent, and much compressed by the heavy winter ice of the quaternary period, so that human bones might well have been destroyed; and, besides, that the Swiss lakes. and Danish shell heaps were almost devoid of human bones. But, finally, at the meeting of the Société d'Anthropologie, of 13th August, 1864, M. Boucher de Perthes announced that he had found fragments of human bones, representing all ages. Remembering the captiousness which had met his former statements, he had persuaded the mayor and several of the leading men of Abbeville to accompany him to the excavations. stand by the workmen as they dug, and receive with their own hands the human fragments from their bed as they were reached.

Of all the relics found, no others have excited so much interest as the human skulls-one found in the cave of Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf; the other in the cave of Engis, in Belgium. The Neanderthal skull has given rise to unusual discussion. The brain capacity, seventy-five cubic inches, is very near an average between a Hindoo and the largest known healthy European skull. But while the brain capacity is so near an average, the shape and formation are the most brutal of any known human skull. The extraordinary prominence of the superciliary arches, the unparalleled flattening of both the forehead and the occiput, and the straightness of the sutures, make this the most ape-like of human skulls. Learned men who claim to know, say it bears no marks of having been the skull of an idiot, and no marks of artificial compression. The rest of the skeleton has nothing peculiar. The stout

ness of the bones and the development of the muscular ridges show that the man must have had great physical strength. It is, of course, impossible to say whether this remarkable skull was an individual instance, or the ordinary type of some race. It is undoubtedly very ancient, but nothing found in the cave with it, and nothing in the manner in which it seems to have been. deposited there, warrants the statement that it is entitled to belong to the post-pliocene period. It may have been cotemporary with the mammoth, but it be much more recent.

may

The Engis skull, however, was found so associated with other fossils, that it is accepted as an unquestionable relic of the days of the mammoth and the cave bear. This skull is in no wise peculiar. Its dimensions are almost precisely identical with two modern skulls, one Australian, and one an English skull, noted in Hunterian museum as typically Caucasian. So far as the scanty human fossil remains give indication, the physical structure of man has undergone no change since he first appeared on earth. Like existing animals that have come down from the post-pliocene period, his type remains the same.

During that whole era, man made little advance in civilization in Western Europe. In the last few thousand years, civilization has accelerated in a geometrical ratio. But as we dimly peer into the conjectural past, the advance appears to have been, with occasional fluctuations, more sluggish, till we get back to a uniform degree lasting through cycles. The data we have are certainly scanty. The stone implements then used, so

far as yet discovered, are of the ruder type, simply chipped, not polished. No specimens of their pottery have as yet been found. There is nothing yet to show they knew anything of agriculture. At the same time, their carvings became a lost art. During all the period of the lake dwellings, no imitations of leaves, animals, or other natural objects were attempted before the introduction of iron. The attempt, even then, to introduce animal shapes into their ornamentation, showed, in that particular, very great inferiority to the cave dwellers of Perigord. The men of the fossil time, living in caves, undoubtedly were as rude as some savage tribes now living; but their works and their funeral rites show that infant man, a new comer upon the world, dwelling among mammoths and gigantic elks, from the beginning asserted his supremacy over other created beings, and showed himself endowed with intelligence, aspiration for art, and belief in his immortality.

But I am checked in calling this the beginning of man. Certain bones have been lately picked up in Southern France. These bones have scratches upon them. They are the bones of the tropical elephant. The scratches are said to be marks made by a sharp quartz implement in scraping off the meat. Hence it has been intimated that the primitive inhabitants of Western Europe may have been cotemporary with the tropical elephant. This suggestion carries us back to an epoch as remote to the time that we have been considering, as that is to the present day. But the suggestion that man lived then, is based on no discovery of remains of a degraded human type, or of skeleton in

termediate between man and gorilla, but is founded upon the supposed presence among the remains of that day of the traces of human intelligence.*

*The recent discovery by Mr. Calvert of engraved bones in strata of the miocene period, in the Dardanelles, is considered as having established the fact of man's existence as early as the miocene epoch.

DARWINISM AND DEITY.

DARWIN claims to have established the existence of a law of nature, which regulates the progressive appearance on earth of the diversified forms of life. I propose to say a few words about his theory, and to add some suggestions about laws of nature in general.

It is accepted by all, that the first forms of life were the simplest; that higher forms appeared later, and man last of all. Whether we read the written account in Genesis, or try to decipher the fossil record inscribed. on the earth's strata, this general statement is equally discerned.

In trying to account for this progressive appearance of diversified forms of life, the most obvious method is, to ascribe it to successive acts of creative power.

This theory of successive creation is upheld by some men of science.

They say that not only was the beginning of the world a creation, but there is reason for holding that the creative power is not in abeyance, but is still in daily exercise. It is said that the spiritual part of man, the soul, the Me, is not an aggregation of particles, but is an absolute, indivisible unit. It is impossible to imagine the consciousness of a person to be divided into separate consciousnesses. But an absolute, indivisible