HOW OLD IS THE WORLD ?

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume X, Issue 105, 3 May 1875, Page 4

HOW OLD IS THE WORLD ?

The JNew York JSatton condenses from an English Scientific p^riodivJ ;' some interesting speculation,; of Dr. Alfred Russell Wallace, on the pro- , liable antiquity of the human species. They may well startle, it aay§, even those who have loner since come to the conclusion that 6000 years carry as but a small way back to the original 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 he 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 66 feet deep in the Nile alluvium indicates an antiquity of 20,000 years, another fragment at 72 feet gives 30,000 years. A human skeleton found at the depth of 16 feet below 400 buried forests, superimposed upon each other, has been calculated by Dr Bowler to have an aatiquity of 50,000 years. But ell these estimates ; pale before those which Kent's cavern of Torquay legitimates. Here the drip - of the stalagmite is the chief factor of our computations, giving us an upper floor which divides the relics of the ■■ last 20(0 or 3000 years from a deposit ; full of the bones of extinct mammalia, indicating an Arctic climate. Names '■; cut in the stalagmite more than 200 years ago are still legible; in other words, where the stalagmite is 12 feet ".' thick, and the drip still very copious, .-;■ not more than a hundredth of a foot haa ; - been deposited in two centuries— a rate of five feet in 100,000 years. Below thie, however, we have a thick, much .~ older, and more crystalline (». 0., more slowly formed) stalagmite, beneath which again, "in a solid breccia, very different from the cave-earth, undoubted v works of earth have been found." Mr ;' Wallace assumes only 100,000 years . . for the upper floors, and about 240,000 for the lower, and adds 150,000 for the immediate cave earth, by which he arrives at the sum of half a million years that have probably elapsed since articles of human workmanship were buried in the lowest depths of Kent's ' cavern.