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History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom

A >> Andrew Dickson White >> History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom




The investigations of the last forty years have shown that
Lucretius and Horace were inspired prophets: what they saw by
the exercise of reason illumined by poetic genius, has been now
thoroughly based upon facts carefully ascertained and
arranged--until Thomsen and Nilsson, the northern archaeologists,
have brought these prophecies to evident fulfilment, by
presenting a scientific classification dividing the age of
prehistoric man in various parts of the world between an old
stone period, a new stone period, a period of beaten copper, a
period of bronze, and a period of iron, and arraying vast masses
of facts from all parts of the world, fitting thoroughly into
each other, strengthening each other, and showing beyond a doubt
that, instead of a FALL, there has been a RISE of man, from the
earliest indications in the Quaternary, or even, possibly, in the
Tertiary period.[190]

[190] For Vanini, see Topinard, Elements of Anthropologie, p. 52.
For a brief and careful summary of the agency of Eccard in
Germany, Goguet in France, Hoare in England, and others in
various parts of Europe, as regards this development of the
scientific view during the eighteenth century, see Mortillet, Le
Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, chap. i. For the agency of Bodin,
Bacon, Descartes, and Pascal, see Flint, Philosophy of History,
introduction, pp. 28 et seq. For a shorter summary, see Lubbock,
Prehistoric Man. For the statements by the northern
archaeologists, see Nilsson, Worsaae, and the other main works
cited in this article. For a generous statement regarding the
great services of the Danish archaeologists in this field, see
Quatrefages, introduction to Cartailhac, Les Ages Prehistoriques
de l'Espagne et du Portugal.


The first blow at the fully developed doctrine of "the Fall"
came, as we have seen, from geology. According to that doctrine,
as held quite generally from its beginnings among the fathers and
doctors of the primitive Church down to its culmination in the
minds of great Protestants like John Wesley, the statement in our
sacred books that "death entered the world by sin" was taken as a
historic fact, necessitating the conclusion that, before the
serpent persuaded Eve to eat of the forbidden fruit, death on our
planet was unknown. Naturally, when geology revealed, in the
strata of a period long before the coming of man on earth, a vast
multitude of carnivorous tribes fitted to destroy their
fellow-creatures on land and sea, and within the fossilized
skeletons of many of these the partially digested remains of
animals, this doctrine was too heavy to be carried, and it was
quietly dropped.

But about the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrine of
the rise of man as opposed to the doctrine of his "fall" received
a great accession of strength from a source most unexpected. As
we saw in the last chapter, the facts proving the great antiquity
of man foreshadowed a new and even more remarkable idea regarding
him. We saw, it is true, that the opponents of Boucher de
Perthes, while they could not deny his discovery of human
implements in the drift, were successful in securing a verdict of
"Not prove " as regarded his discovery of human bones; but their
triumph was short-lived. Many previous discoveries, little
thought of up to that time, began to be studied, and others were
added which resulted not merely in confirming the truth regarding
the antiquity of man, but in establishing another doctrine which
the opponents of science regarded with vastly greater
dislike--the doctrine that man has not fallen from an original
high estate in which he was created about six thousand years ago,
but that, from a period vastly earlier than any warranted by the
sacred chronologists, he has been, in spite of lapses and
deteriorations, rising.

A brief review of this new growth of truth may be useful. As
early as 1835 Prof. Jaeger had brought out from a quantity of
Quaternary remains dug up long before at Cannstadt, near
Stuttgart, a portion of a human skull, apparently of very low
type. A battle raged about it for a time, but this finally
subsided, owing to uncertainties arising from the circumstances
of the discovery.

In 1856, in the Neanderthal, near Dusseldorf, among Quaternary
remains gathered on the floor of a grotto, another skull was
found bearing the same evidence of a low human type. As in the
case of the Cannstadt skull, this again was fiercely debated, and
finally the questions regarding it were allowed to remain in
suspense. But new discoveries were made: at Eguisheim, at Brux,
at Spy, and elsewhere, human skulls were found of a similarly low
type; and, while each of the earlier discoveries was open to
debate, and either, had no other been discovered, might have been
considered an abnormal specimen, the combination of all these
showed conclusively that not only had a race of men existed at
that remote period, but that it was of a type as low as the
lowest, perhaps below the lowest, now known.

Research was now redoubled, and, as a result, human skulls and
complete skeletons of various types began to be discovered in the
ancient deposits of many other parts of the world, and especially
in France, Belgium, Germany, the Caucasus, Africa, and North and
South America.

But soon began to emerge from all these discoveries a fact of
enormous importance. The skulls and bones found at Cro Magnon,
Solutre, Furfooz, Grenelle, and elsewhere, were compared, and it
was thus made certain that various races had already appeared and
lived in various grades of civilization, even in those
exceedingly remote epochs; that even then there were various
strata of humanity ranging from races of a very low to those of a
very high type; and that upon any theory--certainly upon the
theory of the origin of mankind from a single pair--two things
were evident: first, that long, slow processes during vast
periods of time must have been required for the differentiation
of these races, and for the evolution of man up to the point
where the better specimens show him, certainly in the early
Quaternary and perhaps in the Tertiary period; and, secondly,
that there had been from the first appearance of man, of which we
have any traces, an UPWARD tendency.[191]

[191] For Wesley's statement of the amazing consequences of the
entrance of death into the world by sin, see citations in his
sermon on The Fall of Man in the chapter on Geology. For Boucher
de Perthes, see his Life by Ledieu, especially chapters v and
xix; also letters in the appendix; also Les Antiquities Celtiques
et Antediluviennes, as cited in previous chapters of this work.
For an account of the Neanderthal man and other remains
mentioned, see Quatrefages, Human Species, chap. xxvi; also
Mortillet, Le Prehistorique, Paris, 1885, pp. 232 et seq.; also
other writers cited in this chapter. For the other discoveries
mentioned, see the same sources. For an engraving of the skull
and the restored human face of the Neanderthal man, see Reinach,
Antiquities Nationales, etc., vol. i, p. 138. For the vast
regions over which that early race spread, see Quatrefages as
above, p. 307. See also the same author, Histoire Generale des
Races Humaines, in the Bibliotheque Ethnologique, Paris, 1887, p.
4. In the vast mass of literature bearing on this subject, see
Quatrefages, Dupont, Reinach, Joly, Mortillet, Tylor, and
Lubbock, in works cited through these chapters.


This second conclusion, the upward tendency of man from low
beginnings, was made more and more clear by bringing into
relations with these remains of human bodies and of extinct
animals the remains of human handiwork. As stated in the last
chapter, the river drift and bone caves in Great Britain, France,
and other parts of the world, revealed a progression, even in the
various divisions of the earliest Stone period; for, beginning
at the very lowest strata of these remains, on the floors of the
caverns, associated mainly with the bones of extinct animals,
such as the cave bear, the hairy elephant, and the like, were the
rudest implements then, in strata above these, sealed in the
stalagmite of the cavern floors, lying with the bones of animals
extinct but more recent, stone implements were found, still rude,
but, as a rule, of an improved type; and, finally, in a still
higher stratum, associated with bones of animals like the
reindeer and bison, which, though not extinct, have departed to
other climates, were rude stone implements, on the whole of a
still better workmanship. Such was the foreshadowing, even at
that early rude Stone period, of the proofs that the tendency of
man has been from his earliest epoch and in all parts of the
world, as a rule, upward.

But this rule was to be much further exemplified. About 1850,
while the French and English geologists were working more
especially among the relics of the drift and cave periods, noted
archaeologists of the North--Forchammer, Steenstrup, and
Worsaae--were devoting themselves to the investigation of certain
remains upon the Danish Peninsula. These remains were of two
kinds: first, there were vast shell-heaps or accumulations of
shells and other refuse cast aside by rude tribes which at some
unknown age in the past lived on the shores of the Baltic,
principally on shellfish. That these shell-heaps were very
ancient was evident: the shells of oysters and the like found in
them were far larger than any now found on those coasts; their
size, so far from being like that of the corresponding varieties
which now exist in the brackish waters of the Baltic, was in
every case like that of those varieties which only thrive in the
waters of the open salt sea. Here was a clear indication that at
the time when man formed these shell-heaps those coasts were in
far more direct communication with the salt sea than at present,
and that sufficient time must have elapsed since that period to
have wrought enormous changes in sea and land throughout those
regions.

Scattered through these heaps were found indications of a grade
of civilization when man still used implements of stone, but
implements and weapons which, though still rude, showed a
progress from those of the drift and early cave period, some of
them being of polished stone.

With these were other evidences that civilization had progressed.
With implements rude enough to have survived from early periods,
other implements never known in the drift and bone caves began to
appear, and, though there were few if any bones of other domestic
animals, the remains of dogs were found; everything showed that
there had been a progress in civilization between the former
Stone epoch and this.

The second series of discoveries in Scandinavia was made in the
peat-beds: these were generally formed in hollows or bowls
varying in depth from ten to thirty feet, and a section of them,
like a section of the deposits in the bone caverns, showed a
gradual evolution of human culture. The lower strata in these
great bowls were found to be made up chiefly of mosses and
various plants matted together with the trunks of fallen trees,
sometimes of very large diameter; and the botanical examination
of the lowest layer of these trees and plants in the various
bowls revealed a most important fact: for this layer, the first
in point of time, was always of the Scotch fir--which now grows
nowhere in the Danish islands, and can not be made to grow
anywhere in them--and of plants which are now extinct in these
regions, but have retreated within the arctic circle. Coming up
from the bottom of these great bowls there was found above the
first layer a second, in which were matted together masses of oak
trees of different varieties; these, too, were relics of a
bygone epoch, since the oak has almost entirely disappeared from
Denmark. Above these came a third stratum made up of fallen
beech trees; and the beech is now, and has been since the
beginning of recorded history, the most common tree of the Danish
Peninsula.

Now came a second fact of the utmost importance as connected with
the first. Scattered, as a rule, through the lower of these
deposits, that of the extinct fir trees and plants, were found
implements and weapons of smooth stone; in the layer of oak
trees were found implements of bronze; and among the layer of
beeches were found implements and weapons of iron.

The general result of these investigations in these two sources,
the shell mounds and the peat deposits, was the same: the first
civilization evidenced in them was marked by the use of stone
implements more or less smooth, showing a progress from the
earlier rude Stone period made known by the bone caves; then
came a later progress to a higher civilization, marked by the use
of bronze implements; and, finally, a still higher development
when iron began to be used.

The labours of the Danish archaeologists have resulted in the
formation of a great museum at Copenhagen, and on the specimens
they have found, coupled with those of the drift and bone caves,
is based the classification between the main periods or divisions
in the evolution of the human race above referred to.

It was not merely in Scandinavian lands that these results were
reached; substantially the same discoveries were made in Ireland
and France, in Sardinia and Portugal, in Japan and in Brazil, in
Cuba and in the United States; in fact, as a rule, in nearly
every part of the world which was thoroughly examined.[192]

[192] For the general subject, see Mortillet, Le Prehistorique,
p. 498, et passim. For examples of the rude stone implements,
improving as we go from earlier to later layers in the bone
caves, see Boyd Hawkins, Early Man in Britain, chap. vii, p. 186;
also Quatrefages, Human Species, New York, 1879, pp. 305 et seq.
An interesting gleam of light is thrown on the subject in De
Baye, Grottes Prehistoriques de la Marne, pp. 31 et seq.; also
Evans, as cited in the previous chapter. For the more recent
investigations in the Danish shell-heaps, see Boyd Dawkins, Early
Man in Britain, pp. 303, 304. For these evidences of advanced
civilization in the shell-heaps, see Mortillet, p. 498. He, like
Nilsson, says that only the bones of the dog were found; but
compare Dawkins, p. 305. For the very full list of these
discoveries, with their bearing on each other, see Mortillet, p.
499. As to those in Scandanavian countries, see Nilsson, The
Primitive Inhabitants of Scandanavia, third edition, with
Introduction by Lubbock, London, 1868; also the Pre-History of
the North, by Worsaae, English translation, London, 1886. For
shell-mounds and their contents in the Spanish Peninsula, see
Cartailhac's greater work already cited. For summary of such
discoveries throughout the world, see Mortillet, Le
Prehistorique, pp. 497 et seq.


But from another quarter came a yet more striking indication of
this same evolution. As far back as the year 1829 there were
discovered, in the Lake of Zurich, piles and other antiquities
indicating a former existence of human dwellings, standing in the
water at some distance from the shore; but the usual mixture of
thoughtlessness and dread of new ideas seems to have prevailed,
and nothing was done until about 1853, when new discoveries of
the same kind were followed up vigorously, and Rutimeyer, Keller,
Troyon, and others showed not only in the Lake of Zurich, but in
many other lakes in Switzerland, remains of former habitations,
and, in the midst of these, great numbers of relics, exhibiting
the grade of civilization which those lakedwellers had attained.

Here, too, were accumulated proofs of the upward tendency of the
human race. Implements of polished stone, bone, leather, pottery
of various grades, woven cloth, bones of several kinds of
domestic animals, various sorts of grain, bread which had been
preserved by charring, and a multitude of evidences of progress
never found among the earlier, ruder relics of civilization,
showed yet more strongly that man had arrived here at a still
higher stage than his predecessor of the drift, cave, and
shell-heap periods, and had gone on from better to better.

Very striking evidences of this upward tendency were found in
each class of implements. As by comparing the chipped flint
implements of the lower and earlier strata in the cave period
with those of the later and upper strata we saw progress, so, in
each of the periods of polished stone, bronze, and iron, we see,
by similar comparisons, a steady progress from rude to perfected
implements; and especially is this true in the remains of the
various lake-dwellings, for among these can be traced out
constant increase in the variety of animals domesticated, and
gradual improvements in means of subsistence and in ways of
living.

Incidentally, too, a fact, at first sight of small account, but
on reflection exceedingly important, was revealed. The earlier
bronze implements were frequently found to imitate in various
minor respects implements of stone; in other words, forms were
at first given to bronze implements natural in working stone, but
not natural in working bronze. This showed the DIRECTION of the
development--that it was upward from stone to bronze, not
downward from bronze to stone; that it was progress rather than
decline.

These investigations were supplemented by similar researches
elsewhere. In many other parts of the world it was found that
lake-dwellers had existed in different grades of civilization,
but all within a certain range, intermediate between the
cave-dwellers and the historic period. To explain this epoch of
the lake-dwellers, history came in with the account given by
Herodotus of the lake-dwellings on Lake Prasias, which gave
protection from the armies of Persia. Still more important,
Comparative Ethnography showed that to-day, in various parts of
the world, especially in New Guinea and West Africa, races of men
are living in lake-dwellings built upon piles, and with a range
of implements and weapons strikingly like many of those
discovered in these ancient lake deposits of Switzerland.

In Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Scotland, and
other countries, remains of a different sort were also found,
throwing light on this progress. The cromlechs, cranogs, mounds,
and the like, though some of them indicate the work of weaker
tribes pressed upon by stronger, show, as a rule, the same upward
tendency.

At a very early period in the history of these discoveries,
various attempts were made--nominally in the interest of
religion, but really in the interest of sundry creeds and
catechisms framed when men knew little or nothing of natural
laws--to break the force of such evidences of the progress and
development of the human race from lower to higher. Out of all
the earlier efforts two may be taken as fairly typical, for they
exhibit the opposition to science as developed under two
different schools of theology, each working in its own way. The
first of these shows great ingenuity and learning, and is
presented by Mr. Southall in his book, published in 1875,
entitled The Recent Origin of the World. In this he grapples
first of all with the difficulties presented by the early date of
Egyptian civilization, and the keynote of his argument is the
statement made by an eminent Egyptologist, at a period before
modern archaeological discoveries were well understood, that
"Egypt laughs the idea of a rude Stone age, a polished Stone age,
a Bronze age, an Iron age, to scorn."

Mr. Southall's method was substantially that of the late
excellent Mr. Gosse in geology. Mr. Gosse, as the readers of
this work may remember, felt obliged, in the supposed interest of
Genesis, to urge that safety to men's souls might be found in
believing that, six thousand years ago, the Almighty, for some
inscrutable purpose, suddenly set Niagara pouring very near the
spot where it is pouring now; laid the various strata, and
sprinkled the fossils through them like plums through a pudding;
scratched the glacial grooves upon the rocks, and did a vast
multitude of things, subtle and cunning, little and great, in all
parts of the world, required to delude geologists of modern times
into the conviction that all these things were the result of a
steady progress through long epochs. On a similar plan, Mr.
Southall proposed, at the very beginning of his book, as a final
solution of the problem, the declaration that Egypt, with its
high civilization in the time of Mena, with its races, classes,
institutions, arrangements, language, monuments--all indicating
an evolution through a vast previous history--was a sudden
creation which came fully made from the hands of the Creator. To
use his own words, "The Egyptians had no Stone age, and were born
civilized."

There is an old story that once on a time a certain jovial King
of France, making a progress through his kingdom, was received at
the gates of a provincial town by the mayor's deputy, who began
his speech on this wise: "May it please your Majesty, there are
just thirteen reasons why His Honour the Mayor can not be present
to welcome you this morning. The first of these reasons is that
he is dead." On this the king graciously declared that this
first reason was sufficient, and that he would not trouble the
mayor's deputy for the twelve others.

So with Mr. Southall's argument: one simple result of scientific
research out of many is all that it is needful to state, and this
is, that in these later years we have a new and convincing
evidence of the existence of prehistoric man in Egypt in his
earliest, rudest beginnings; the very same evidence which we
find in all other parts of the world which have been carefully
examined. This evidence consists of stone implements and weapons
which have been found in Egypt in such forms, at such points, and
in such positions that when studied in connection with those
found in all other parts of the world, from New Jersey to
California, from France to India, and from England to the Andaman
Islands, they force upon us the conviction that civilization in
Egypt, as in all other parts of the world, was developed by the
same slow process of evolution from the rudest beginnings.

It is true that men learned in Egyptology had discouraged the
idea of an earlier Stone age in Egypt, and that among these were
Lepsius and Brugsch; but these men were not trained in
prehistoric archaeology; their devotion to the study of the
monuments of Egyptian civilization had evidently drawn them away
from sympathy, and indeed from acquaintance, with the work of men
like Boucher de Perthes, Lartet, Nilsson, Troyon, and Dawkins.
But a new era was beginning. In 1867 Worsaae called attention to
the prehistoric implements found on the borders of Egypt; two
years later Arcelin discussed such stone implements found beneath
the soil of Sakkara and Gizeh, the very focus of the earliest
Egyptian civilization; in the same year Hamy and Lenormant found
such implements washed out from the depths higher up the Nile at
Thebes, near the tombs of the kings; and in the following year
they exhibited more flint implements found at various other
places. Coupled with these discoveries was the fact that Horner
and Linant found a copper knife at twenty-four feet, and pottery
at sixty feet, below the surface. In 1872 Dr. Reil, director of
the baths at Helouan, near Cairo, discovered implements of
chipped flint; and in 1877. Dr. Jukes Brown made similar
discoveries in that region. In 1878 Oscar Fraas, summing up the
question, showed that the stone implements were mainly such as
are found in the prehistoric deposits of other countries, and
that, Zittel having found them in the Libyan Desert, far from the
oases, there was reason to suppose that these implements were
used before the region became a desert and before Egypt was
civilized. Two years later Dr. Mook, of Wurzburg, published a
work giving the results of his investigations, with careful
drawings of the rude stone implements discovered by him in the
upper Nile Valley, and it was evident that, while some of these
implements differed slightly from those before known, the great
mass of them were of the character so common in the prehistoric
deposits of other parts of the world.

A yet more important contribution to this mass of facts was made
by Prof. Henry Haynes, of Boston, who in the winter of 1877 and
1878 began a very thorough investigation of the subject, and
discovered, a few miles east of Cairo, many flint implements.
The significance of Haynes's discoveries was twofold: First,
there were, among these, stone axes like those found in the
French drift beds of St. Acheul, showing that the men who made or
taught men how to make these in Egypt were passing through the
same phase of savagery as that of Quaternary France; secondly, he
found a workshop for making these implements, proving that these
flint implements were not brought into Egypt by invaders, but
were made to meet the necessities of the country. From this
first field Prof. Haynes went to Helouan, north of Cairo, and
there found, as Dr. Reil had done, various worked flints, some of
them like those discovered by M. Riviere in the caves of
southern France; thence he went up the Nile to Luxor, the site of
ancient Thebes, began a thorough search in the Tertiary limestone
hills, and found multitudes of chipped stone implements, some of
them, indeed, of original forms, but most of forms common in
other parts of the world under similar circumstances, some of the
chipped stone axes corresponding closely to those found in the
drift beds of northern France.

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