st 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 be