en grains of truth are separated from the dross of crude conjecture
and hasty generalization. We are not prepared ourselves to say that the
evidence itself is final and conclusive. We have sketched it for the
purpose of giving the distinguished author a full hearing, and affording
the reader an opportunity to judge for himself. We await the logical
sequences of time, knowing full well that the laws which regulate the
progress of science are as stable and infallible as the laws which
control the motions of the solar and planetary systems. One thing,
however, we may be excused for saying: All the attempts we have seen to
parry the force of this evidence, and to account for the acknowledged
phenomena and facts within the schedule of the received chronology,
strike us as singularly and painfully feeble. One suggestion is that the
bodies of the extinct mammalia may have been preserved in ice until the
recent period, and their bones deposited contemporaneously with those of
modern species and man. Another is that the geologists may be vastly
mistaken as to the date of the extinction of species, and that in fact
the mastodon, mammoth, and other species found in juxtaposition with
human remains and works of art, have probably survived until a very
recent period. Without entering into detail on these points, we would
venture the prediction that when weighed in the balance they will be
found utterly wanting. One type of discussion will survive, if it
survive at all, as a most curious fossil of the layers of modern
thought. It is that represented by the book referred to in a note on a
former page, by Mr. Davies. Believing that all mineral fossils were
never living animals at all, but the types simply of animals that were
to be, stamped instantaneously upon the rocks as prophetic symbols of a
work of creation to be afterward accomplished, he is prepared to hear
without surprise that man should some day be found as a fossil. We refer
to it as a most curious mental product. If it is not unanswerable, we
presume it will at least remain unanswered.

What now, in conclusion, is to be the effect of this new development of
science on the received and traditionary thinking of the time? What
readjustments will be necessary in case the doctrine of the antiquity of
man comes by and by to take its place, in the creed of science,
alongside of the doctrine of the great age of the earth? Can it be made
to harmonize with what is now known as orthod