THE ANTIQUITY OF THE WORLD.

Grey River Argus, Volume XVI, Issue 2074, 2 April 1875, Page 3

THE ANTIQUITY OF THE WORLD.

The New York "Nation" condenses from an English scientific periodical some interesting speculations of Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace on the probable antiquity of the human species. They may well startle, it says, even those who have long since come to the conclusion that 6000 years carry us but a small way back to the orighal home. In fact in Dr Wallace's reckoning, 6000 years are but a day. He reviews the various attempts to determine the antiquity of human remains or works of art, and finds the bronze age in Europe to have been pretty accurately fixed at 3000 or 4000 years ago, the stone age of the Swiss lake' dwellings' at 5000 or 7000 . years, and an indefinite anterior period. The burnt brick found 60ft deep in the Nile alluvium indicates an antiquity of 20,000 years ; another fragment at 72ftgives 30,000 years. A human skeleton found at a depth of 16ft below 400 buried foreste, superimposed upon each other, has been calculated by Dr Dowler to have an antiquity of 60,000 years. But all these estimates pale, before those whiohKent's cavern at Torquay legitimates. Here the drip of the stalagmite is the chief factor of our computions, giving us an upper floor which divides the relics of the last 2000 or 3000 years, from a deposit full of the bones of extinct mammalia indicating an Arctio climate. Names cut in the stalagmite more than 200 years ago are still legible ;in other words, where the stalagmite is 12ft thick, and the drip still very copions, not more than a hundredth of a- foot has been deposited in two centuries—a >Tate of sffe in 100,000 years. Below this, however, we have a thick, much older, and more crystalline (i.e., more slowly formed) stalagmite, beneath which again, "in a solid breccia, very different from the cave-earth, undoubted works of art have been found." Mr Wallace assumes only 100,000 years for the upper floors and about 250, C00 for the lower, and adds 160^000 for the immediate cave-earth, by which he arrives at the sum jof half a million years that have probably elapsed since articles of human workmanship were buried in the lowest depth of 1 Kent's cavern.