rolled on. All these were legitimate themes for science; and all of
them were opposed to the popular belief at the time--as much so as is
the antiquity of man now. And further, we say that the mere suspicion
that any such thing may be--the mere surmise of any such fact--the
merest inkling which scientific men may get of a secret yet hidden
beneath the veil, and waiting to be revealed--is a sufficient
justification of those _tentative_ efforts of science which often result
in the attainment of some grand discovery. Let no timid religionist
charge upon scientific men that they are conspiring with malice prepense
to undermine the popular creeds and overthrow the Bible. This is sheer
nonsense. They follow where nature beckons them. If man has had a high
antiquity on this earth, science will find it out and prove it beyond a
doubt. If he has not had such antiquity, science will discover that too,
and prove it. All we have to do is to let science have her way.

Another remark which we make here, is respecting the power which a
_single fact_ may have in this investigation. It is not often that great
questions in history, or social polity, or jurisprudence are determined
by a single fact. The great results of history, economics, and law are
effected by the converging power of many facts. So also in science. Its
great results are determined by the accumulated power of multitudinous
facts. Its final categories are fixed by abundant certainties and
manifold inductions. And yet it may sometimes occur that a single fact
may be of such a nature that there is no escaping the conclusion which
it forces upon the mind. It may concentrate in itself all the elements
of certainty usually obtained from many sources. It may be determinative
in its very nature, and admit of scepticism only at the expense of
rationality. A single human grave, with its entombed skeleton,
discovered in some uninhabited waste, where it was never known the foot
of man had trod, would prove conclusively that human footsteps had once
trod there. The discovery of a single weapon of the quality and temper
of the Damascus blade amid the ruins of a buried city, would prove as
fully as would the discovery of a thousand that the people of that age
of the world understood the methods of working steel. One canoe found
moored to the bank of the Delaware, the Schuylkill, or the Susquehanna,
when the white man began to penetrate this continent, would have been
sufficient to prov