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of clay and gravel. The most remarkable discovery, however, is that known as the Calaveras skull. In the year 1866 some miners found in the cement, in close proximity to a petrified oak, a curious rounded mass of earthy and stony material containing bones, which they put on one side, thinking it was a curiosity of some kind. Professor Wyman, to whom it was given, had great difficulty in removing the cemented gravel and discovering that it was really a human skull nearly entire. Its base was embedded in a conglomerate mass of ferruginous earth, water-worn volcanic pebbles, calcareous tufa, and fragments of bones, and several bones of the human foot and other parts of the skeleton were found wedged into the internal cavity of the skull. Chemical examination showed the bones to be in a fossilised condition, the organic matter and phosphate of lime being replaced by carbonate. It was found beneath four beds of lava, and in the fourth bed of gravel from the surface; and Professor Whitney, who afterwards secured the specimen for the State Geological Museum, has no doubt whatever of its having been found as described.

In Professor Whitney's elaborate Report on the Auriferous Gravels of the Sierra Nevada, from which most of the preceding sketch is taken, he arrives at the conclusion that the whole evidence distinctly proves "that man existed in California previous to the cessation of volcanic activity in the Sierra Nevada, to the epoch of greatest extension of the glaciers in that region, and to the erosion of the present rivercañons and valleys, at a time when the animal and vegetable creations differed entirely from what they are now, and when the topographical features of the State were extremely unlike those exhibited by the present surface." He elsewhere states that the animal and vegetable remains of these deposits prove them to be of "at least as ancient a date as the European Pliocene."

Professor Whitney enumerates two other cases in which human bones have been discovered in the auriferous gravel, and in one of them the bones were found by an educated observer, Dr. Boyce, M.D., under a bed of basaltic lava eight feet thick; but these are of but little importance when compared with the preceding cases, as to which we have such full and precise details. The reason why these remarkable dis

coveries should have been made in California rather than in any other part of America is sufficiently apparent if we consider the enormous amount of excavation of the Pliocene gravels in the long-continued prosecution of gold-mining, and also the probability that the region was formerly, as now, characterised by a milder climate, and a more luxuriant perennial vegetation, and was thus able to support a comparatively dense popula tion even in those remote times. Admitting that man did inhabit the Pacific slope at the time indicated, the remains appear to be of such a character as might be anticipated, and present all the characteristics of genuine discoveries.

Concluding Remarks on the Antiquity of Man

Even these Californian remains do not exhaust the proofs of man's great antiquity in America, since we have the record of another discovery which indicates that he may, possibly, have existed at an even more remote epoch. Mr. E. L. Berthoud has described the finding of stone implements of a rude type in the Tertiary gravels of the Crow Creek, Colorado. Some shells were obtained from the same gravels, which were determined by Mr. T. A. Conrad to be species which are "certainly not later than Older Pliocene, or possibly Miocene." The account of this remarkable discovery, published in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, 1872, is not very clear or precise, and it is much to be wished that some competent geologist would examine the locality. But the series of proofs of the existence of man by the discovery of his remains or his works going back step by step to the Pliocene period, which have been now briefly enumerated, takes away from this alleged discovery the extreme improbability which would be held to attach to it at the time when it was made.

It is surely now time that this extreme scepticism as to any extension of the human period beyond that reached by Boucher de Perthes, half a century ago, should give way to the ever-increasing body of facts on the other side of the question. Geologists and anthropologists must alike feel that there is a great, and at present inexplicable, chasm intervening between the earliest remains of man and those of his animal predecessors-that the entire absence of the "missing

link" is a reproach to the doctrine of evolution; yet with strange inconsistency they refuse to accept evidence which in the case of any extinct or living animal, other than man, would be at least provisionally held to be sufficient, but follow in the very footsteps of those who blindly refused even to examine into the evidence adduced by the earlier discoverers of the . antiquity of man, and thus play into the hands of those who can adduce his recent origin and unchangeability as an argument against the descent of man from the lower animals. Believing that the whole bearing of the comparative anatomy of man and of the anthropoid apes, together with the absence of indications of any essential change in his structure during the quaternary period, lead to the conclusion that he must have existed, as man, in Pliocene times, and that the intermediate forms connecting him with the higher apes probably lived during the early Pliocene or the Miocene period, it is urged that all such discoveries as those described in the present article are in themselves probable and such as we have a right to expect. If this be the case, the proper way to treat evidence as to man's antiquity is to place it on record, and admit it provisionally wherever it would be held adequate in the case of other animals; not, as is too often now the case, ignore it as unworthy of acceptance or subject its discoverers to indiscriminate accusations of being either impostors themselves or the victims of impostors. Error is sure to be soon detected, and its very detection is often a valuable lesson. But facts once rejected are apt to remain long buried in obscurity, and their non-recognition may often act as a check to further progress. It is in the hope of inducing a more healthy public opinion on this interesting and scientifically important question that this brief record of the evidences of man's antiquity in North America has been compiled.

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The Century before Darwin-The Voyage of the Beagle-The Journal of Researches Studies of Domestic Animals-Studies of Cultivated and Wild Plants-Researches on the Cowslip, Primrose, and Loosestrife -The Struggle for Existence-Geographical Distribution and Dispersal of Organisms-The Descent of Man and Later Works-Estimate of Darwin's Life-Work.

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THE great man recently taken from us had achieved an amount of reputation and honour perhaps never before accorded to a contemporary writer on science. His name has given a new word to several languages, and his genius is acknowledged wherever civilisation extends. Yet the very greatness of his fame, together with the number, variety, and scientific importance of his works, has caused him to be altogether misapprehended by the bulk of the reading public. Every book of Darwin's has been reviewed or noticed in almost every newspaper and periodical, while his theories have been the subject of so much criticism and so much dispute, that most educated persons have been able to obtain some general notion of his teachings, often without having read a single chapter of his works, and very few, indeed, except professed students of science, have read the whole series of them. It has been so easy to learn something of the Darwinian theory at second-hand that few have cared to study it as expounded by its author.

It thus happens that, while Darwin's name and fame are more widely known than in the case of any other modern man of science, the real character and importance of the work he did are as widely misunderstood. The best scientific

1 This article appeared in the Century Magazine of January 1883.

authorities rank him far above the greatest names in natural science-above Linnæus and Cuvier, the great teachers of a past generation-above De Candolle and Agassiz, Owen and Huxley, in our own times. Many must feel inclined to ask,— What is the secret of this lofty pre-eminence so freely accorded to a contemporary by his fellow-workers? What has Darwin done, that even those who most strongly oppose his theories rarely suggest that he is overrated? Why is it universally felt that the only name with which his can be compared in the whole domain of science is that of the illustrious Newton?

It will be my endeavour in the present chapter to answer these questions, however imperfectly, by giving a connected sketch of the work which Darwin did, the discoveries which he made, the new fields of research which he opened up, the new conceptions of nature which he has given us. Such a sketch may help to clear away some of the obscurity which undoubtedly prevails as to the cause and foundation of Darwin's pre-eminence.

In order to understand the vast and fundamental change effected by the publication of Darwin's most important volume-The Origin of Species-we must take a hasty glance at the progress of the science of natural history during the preceding century.

The Century before Darwin

Almost exactly a hundred years before Darwin we find Linnæus and his numerous disciples hard at work describing and naming all animals and plants then discovered, and classifying them according to the artificial method of the great master, which is still known as the Linnæan System; and from that time to the present day a large proportion of naturalists are fully occupied with this labour of describing new species and new genera, and in classifying them according to the improved and more natural systems which have been gradually introduced.

But another body of students have always been dissatisfied with this superficial mode of studying externals only, and have devoted themselves to a minute examination of the internal structure of animals and plants; and early in this century the great Cuvier showed how this knowledge of

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