ANTIQUITY OF THE WORLD.

Patea Mail, Volume 1, Issue 14, 29 May 1875, Page 3

ANTIQUITY OF THE WORLD.

The “ Now 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 t!,000 years carry us hut a very small way back to the origaal home. In fact, in Dr "Wallace’s reckoning, G,GOO years arc but a day. Ho 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 8,000 or 4,000 years ago, the stone age of the Pwiss lake dwellings at 5,000 or 7,000 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 72ft. gives 30,000 years. A human skeleton found at a depth of IGl't below 400 buried forests, superimposed upon each other, has been calculated by Dr Dowler to have an iutiquity of 50,000 years. But all these estimates pale before those which Kent’s cavern at Torquay legitimates. Here the drip of the stalagmite is the chief factor of our computations, giving ns an upper floor which divides the relics of the last 2000 or 3000 years, from a dujiosit full of the bones of extinct mamma* indicating an Artie climate. Names cut in the stalagmite more than 200 years ago are still legible; in other words, where the stalagmite is 12 foot thick, 'and the drip still very copious, not more than a hundredth of a foot has

})<*( u deposited in two centuries—a rate of 5 feet in 100,000 years. Below this, however, wo 1 invo a thick, much older ami more eryslalline (i.e., more slowly formed) stalagmite, beneath which again, “ in a solid breccia, very different from tbo rave-earth, nndonbtod works of art hiive iseen found.” Mr Wallace assumes only 100,000 years for the upper floors ami about 2;'»O,o00 for the lower, and adds 1 .'.0,000 for the immediate caveearth, hy which he ;irrives at the sum of half a million years that probably elapsed since articles of human workmanship were hurled in the lowest depth of Kent’s cavern.