on of Gaul; and the
monuments of Egypt, for which Bunsen claimed twenty thousand years, are
now acknowledged by the best Egyptologists to reach not quite to 3000 B.
C. As to the bone found at the base of the bluff at Memphis, it was not
found _in situ_, and probably was washed out of some Indian grave at the
top, and buried in the _debris_. The Abbeville skull[126] _had a fresh
tooth in it_, for which thirty-five thousand years was claimed, until
examination by a competent committee exposed the deception. Where there
is a good paying demand for pre-Adamite skulls, there will always be a
good supply. Dr. Dowler calculates the age of a skeleton of an Indian,
found at the depth of sixteen feet in digging the gas works at New
Orleans, at fifty thousand years; while the U. S. Coast Surveying
Department show that the whole Delta is not more than four thousand four
hundred years old.

These gross errors, which affront our common sense, wherever we are able
to test geological calculations, fill us with mistrust of their
allegations of evidence, which, from the nature of the case, we can not
test.

Of this class is the discovery of human bones in caves containing the
bones of cave bears, rhinocerii, mammoths, and other extinct animals.
The argument is that man and these animals lived at the same time. Very
well, what time was that? There is no evidence to show that it was a
hundred thousand years ago. The Siberian hunters fed their dogs on the
flesh of a mammoth they found frozen in mud bluffs at the mouth of the
Lena, and its hair and wool are now in the museum of St. Petersburg. Dr.
Warren's _mastodon giganteus_ had some bushels of pine and maple twigs,
in excellent preservation, in its stomach, when exhumed in Orange
County, New York; and you may see for yourself the vegetable fiber found
in its teeth in his museum in Boston.[127] Does any one believe that the
vegetable fiber and maple twigs have kept their shape one hundred
thousand years? The mammoth found in the ditch of the Tezcucoco road
must have fallen in after the Incas had dug that ditch. The Indians have
a tradition that their fathers hunted a huge deer with a hand on his
face, which slept leaning against the trees. And there is good
geological reason for believing that the final extinction of the
mammoth, the European rhinoceros, and their contemporaries, was caused
by the change of climate in Northern Europe, Asia, and America, caused
by the elevation of these n