Chapter VII. The Exuberance of Life

Paradise Found, by William F. Warren, [1885], at sacred-texts.com

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CHAPTER VII.

THE EXUBERANCE OF LIFE.

And the Lord God planted a garden. And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food.—The Book of Genesis.

Moreover, there were a great number of elephants in the island; and there was provision for animals of every kind. Also whatever fragrant things there are in the earth, whether roots, or herbage, or woods, or distilling drops of flowers or fruits, grew and thrived in that land.—The Critias of Plato.

Wie verkehrt man überhaupt geht, wenn man lediglich aus dem Kreise unsrer jetzigen Erfahrung die Urwelt construiren will, haben uns die paläontologischen Entdeckungen der neuern Zeit gelehrt, die eben in der Urwelt uns die riesenhaftesten and wunderbarsten Thiergestalten vorführen.—Dr. H. Lüken.

According to all ancient traditions and beliefs, the cradle of the human race was in a portion of the world characterized by an altogether extraordinary exuberance of life. Of all lands the sun shone upon it was the fairest and best. Even down to the Deluge, and later, something of the divine goodness of that primeval home-land remained. In the eyes of Plato, the steady deterioration has been going on from the beginning, the good soil washing down from the heavenly mountains of the earth's summit and disappearing in the abyss, until, "in comparison with what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body, as they may be called,—all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, and the mere skeleton of the land being left." ¹

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The deterioration of the climate of the mother-region of the race is particularly described in the first Fargard of the Avesta: "The first of the good lands and countries which I, Ahura Mazda, created was the Airyana Vaêjô [Aîran Vêj, "Iran the Ancient "] by the good river Dâitya. Thereupon came Angra Mainyu [Ahriman], who is all death, and he counter-created by his witchcraft the serpent in the river, and winter, a work of the daêvas. There are [now] ten winter months there, two summer months, and these are cold for the waters, cold for the earth, and cold for the trees." ¹ So in Fargard second we have a legendary account of the successive migrations of the earliest remembered men out of the original North country "southwards, to meet the sun," and nearly all commentators ascribe these repeated "southward" movements to the gradual refrigeration and glaciation of the primitive home in "Iran the Ancient." ²

The same idea of a perfect primeval climate is found among all ancient peoples. Ovid represents

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the spring, in Saturn's reign, to have been perennial. The spring of our world-age is only an abbreviated reminder of that great original. ¹ So Lactantius has preserved a fragment of the old ethnic creed when he tells us that only upon the loss of Paradise, darkness and winter came over the earth. ²

With this supposed deterioration of soil and climate the deterioration of man kept pace. Hence ancient writers, with hardly an exception, represent the men of their own day as far inferior in stature, in strength, and in longevity to the first progenitors of the race. Hesiod, Aratus, Ovid, Vergil, and Claudian vary somewhat in their accounts of the Golden, Silver, and later ages of human history, but all agree in representing the men of their time as weak and puny and short-lived, compared with men of the early ages of the world. Juvenal, in a well-known passage, alludes to Homer's judgment, and expresses his own:

Plato, speaking of the antediluvians, says, "For many generations, as long as the divine nature lasted in them, they were obedient to the laws, and well affectioned toward the gods who were their kinsmen; for they possessed true and in every way great spirits, practicing gentleness and wisdom in the various chances of life and in their intercourse with one another. . . . By such reflections, and by the continuance in them of the divine nature, all that

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we have described waxed and increased in them; but when this divine portion began to fade away in them, and became diluted too often, and with too much of the mortal admixture, and the human nature got the upper hand, they, being unable to bear their fortune, became unseemly, and to him who had an eye to see they began to appear base, and had lost the fairest of their precious gifts." ¹

The ancient Indian conception of the world's decadence from period to period is given in the "Laws of Manu." ² Of the four great ages of the life of the present universe, we are living in the last and worst. In the first yuga all men were holy; in the present all are utterly corrupt and vile. In the first they were tall and long-lived; in each succeeding age they have grown dwarfed and feeble.

Similar to the Indian was the Iranian belief as reflected in the Bundahish. Here the duration of the universe is represented as filling four world-periods of three thousand years each. During the first of the four all is pure and sinless, but at its close the Evil One declares war against Ahura Mazda, the holy God, which war is destined to fill the three last ages. During the first of the three, the Evil One is unsuccessful; during the second, good and evil are exactly balanced; while in the last, which is our own, evil obtains, and till the destined overthrow at the very end maintains supremacy. ³

The conception which we are noticing is as old as it is universal. Berosus, reporting the earliest traditions

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of Chaldæa, represents the first men as of extraordinary stature and strength, and as retaining in lessening degree these characteristics until some generations after the Flood. ¹ "Among the Egyptians," says Lenormant, "the terrestrial reign of the god Râ, who inaugurated the existence of the world and of human life, was a Golden Age, to which they continually looked back with regret and envy: to assert the superiority of anything above all that imagination could set forth, it was sufficient to affirm that 'its like had never been seen since the days of the god Râ.' The same idea is found again in the Egyptian account of the succession of the terrestrial reigns of the gods, the demi-gods, heroes, and men, as collected from the fragments of Manetho, and corroborated by the testimony of native texts." ² In China, too, the catholic ethnic faith in a primeval Golden Age was not lacking, so that everywhere the eldest traditions—be they Shemitic, Aryan, or Turanian—support, confirm, and illustrate the representations of the Bible touching the extraordinary pristine vitality of Edenic nature and of antediluvian man. So overwhelming is the evidence that this universal belief of antiquity is a reminiscence of primitive reality, that one who expressly disclaims a personal belief in the superior stature of the early men nevertheless asserts that "the universality of the popular belief attests its very ancient origin," and adds that "it may unhesitatingly be ranked among those originating at a time when the great civilized peoples of a remote antiquity, still clustering

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about the cradle of the race, enjoyed a contact sufficiently close for some common traditions." ¹

The bearing of this unanimous verdict of ancient tradition upon the problem of the location of Eden is obvious. The traditions of the whole ethnic world, not less than the record in Genesis, require that the cradle of the race be placed in the one spot on earth where the biological conditions are the most favorable possible. According to all procurable data, that spot at the era of man's appearance upon the stage was in the now lost "Miocene continent," which then surrounded the Arctic Pole. That in that true, original Eden some of the early generations of men attained to a stature and longevity unequaled in any countries known to postdiluvian history is by no means scientifically incredible. On the contrary, the exceptional biological conditions of that land and the remarkable consensus of all tradition respecting the vigor of early giant races combine to form a fresh illustration of the principle that the more incredible things an hypothesis explains, the more irresistibly credible the hypothesis itself becomes.

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Back in that far-off foretime, even in the lower latitudes, life was remarkably luxuriant. The paleontologists almost exhaust the resources of language in the effort to describe it. Thus, on a single page, Professor Alleyne Nicholson, of St. Andrew's University, says: "The life of the Miocene period is extremely abundant, also extremely varied in its character. . . . The marine beds have yielded numerous remains of both vertebrate and invertebrate sea-animals, . . . an enormous number of plants. . . . The remains of air-breathing animals are also abundantly found. . . . The plants of the Miocene period are extraordinarily numerous. . . . The plant-remains . . . indicate an extraordinarily rank and luxuriant vegetation," etc. ¹ Figuier gives the following illustration: "The Lycopods of our age are humble plants, scarcely a yard in height and most common creepers; but those of the ancient world were trees of eighty or ninety feet in height." ² But we have before seen that the mother-region of all the abounding and varied floral and faunal types was within the Arctic Circle, and from their amazing exuberance in low latitudes we may form some conception of the yet superior potencies of life which were at work in that more highly favored circumpolar, seed-plot of the whole earth.

In our last chapter it was suggested that the Tree in the midst of Paradise may have been as lofty as one of the giant Sequoias of California. The comparison was not made at random. In the Miocene remains in Britain, conifers are especially numerous. And "the most abundant of these is a gigantic pine,

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the Sequoia Couttsiæ, which is very nearly allied to the huge Sequoia gigantea of California. A nearly allied form, Sequoia Langsdorfii, has been detected in the Hebrides." ¹ From the latitude of the Sequoia grove in Mariposa County, California, to that of the Hebrides is a long stride toward the Pole; but we are not left to mere inference when we raise the question whether the original starting-point of this gigantic tree-species may not have been still higher in the Arctic regions. The Miocene fossils of the highest attainable Arctic latitudes tell their own story. Limited as have been the explorations among these fossils, as Sir Charles Lyell remarks, "more than thirty species of Coniferæ have been found, including several Sequoias allied to the gigantic Wellingtonia of California. . . . There are also beeches, oaks, planes, poplars, walnuts, limes, and even a magnolia, two cones of which have lately been obtained, proving that this splendid evergreen not only lived, but ripened its fruit, within the Arctic Circle. Many of the limes, planes, and oaks were large-leaved species, and both flowers and fruits, besides immense quantities of leaves, are in many cases preserved. . . . Even in Spitzbergen, within 12° of the Pole, no less than ninety-five species of fossil plants have been obtained." The vigor of the vegetable life of the Miocene age in these Arctic regions impresses the veteran geologist as "truly remarkable."

We have a right, then, not only to draw a conclusion from the "abundant" and "extraordinarily rank and luxuriant vegetation" of the Arctic regions in Miocene time, but also to learn a special lesson from

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the gigantic forms which linger on our Western coast. Had the book of Genesis described one of the trees of Eden as three hundred and twenty feet in height and thirty feet in diameter at the base, not only all the Voltaires of modern history, but also—until the discovery of California—all naturalists of the advanced anti-Christian variety, would have made no end of sport over the unscientific or mythical "Botany of Moses." But the Sequoia gigantea is a living, indisputable fact. Though not the oldest of the Coniferæ, it illustrates some of the earlier possibilities of vegetable life. It tells the botanist that growths once realized in great abundance are dying out, and unless perpetuated by human care are soon to disappear from our globe forever. Its last surviving representatives in the state of nature, preserved to our day by certain fortunate local conditions and by their own inherent longevity, are witnesses respecting a far-off world,—witnesses whose testimony the most incredulous must accept. They tell of the far-away dawn of the day of man, they bear testimony to the extraordinary life which characterized their distant birth-land. ¹ And if these last individuals of an expiring race can maintain, under unfavorable biological conditions, a vigorous life through two millenniums of time, who shall declare it impossible that

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the men of the time and place of the origination of the Sequoia gigantea should have averaged more than six feet in stature, or attained to an age quite surpassing our threescore years and ten? As to the latter point, it would require more than the combined lives of two Methuselahs to watch the growth and death of a single tree like those of California. The thought is not the incubation of the present writer; it is what the trees themselves said to the foremost botanist of America. ¹

But the exuberance of animal life in the Miocene period is not less remarkable. We quote the same author as before: "The Invertebrate animals of this period are very numerous. . . . The little shells of the Foraminifera are extremely abundant. . . . Corals are very abundant, in many instances forming regular reefs. . . . Numerous crabs and lobsters represent the Crustacea. . . . Of Insects more than thirteen hundred species have been determined by Dr. Heer from the Miocene strata of Switzerland alone. . . . The Mollusca are very numerous. . . . Polyzoans

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are abundant. Bivalves and Univalves are extremely plentiful. . . . The Fishes of the period are very abundant. . . . The remains of Reptiles are far from uncommon. . . . The Land-tortoises make their first appearance during this period. The most remarkable form of this group is the huge Colossochelys Atlas of the Upper Miocene deposits of the Siwâlik Hills in India, described by Dr. Falconer and Sir Proby Cautley. Far exceeding any living tortoise in its dimensions, this enormous animal is estimated as having had a length of about twenty feet, measured from the tip of the snout to the extremity of the tail, and to have stood upwards of seven feet. . . . The accomplished paleontologists just quoted show further that some of the traditions of the Hindus would render it not improbable that this colossal Tortoise survived into the earlier portion of the human period. . . . The Mammals of the Miocene are very numerous. . . . The Edentates (Sloths, etc.) are represented by two large European forms. One of these is the large Macrotherium giganteum. . . . The other is the still more gigantic Ancylotherium Pentelici, which seems to have been as large as, or larger than, the rhinoceros. . . . We may also note here the first appearance of true 'whalebone Whales,' two species of which, resembling the living 'Right Whale' of the Arctic seas, and belonging to the same genus, have been detected in the Miocene beds of North America. . . . The great order of the Ungulates, or hoofed quadrupeds, is very largely developed in strata of the Miocene age, various new types making their appearance here for the first time. . . . We meet for the first time with representatives of the family Rhinoceridæ, comprising the only existing rhinoceroses. . . .

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[paragraph continues] The family of the Tapirs is represented, . . . some of which were quite diminutive in point of size, whilst others attained the dimensions of a horse. Nearly allied to this family, also, is the singular group of quadrupeds which Marsh had described under the name of Brontotheridæ. These extraordinary animals, typified by Brontotherium itself, agree with . . . and differ from the existing Tapirs. . . . Brontotherium gigas is said to be nearly as large as an elephant, whilst Brontotherium ingens appears to have attained dimensions still more gigantic. The well-known genus Titanotherium would also appear to belong to this group. . . . The family of the Horses appears under various forms in the Miocene, but the most important and best known of these is the Hipparion. . . . Remains of the Hipparion have been found in various regions in Europe and in India; and from the immense quantities of their bones found in certain localities, it may be safely inferred that these Middle Tertiary ancestors of the Horse lived, like their modern representatives, in great herds. . . . Amongst the even-toed Ungulates we for the first time meet with examples of the Hippopotamus, with its four-toed feet, its massive body, and huge tusk-like lower teeth. . . . The true Deer, with their solid bony antlers, appear for the first time here. . . . Perhaps the most remarkable of these Miocene Ruminants is the Sivatherium giganteum of the Siwâlik Hills in India. In this extraordinary animal there were two pairs of horns. . . . If all these horns had been simple, there would have been no difficulty in considering Sivatherium as simply a gigantic four-horned Antelope. . . . It is to the Miocene period that we must refer the first appearance

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of the important order of the Elephants and their allies (Proboscidians). . . . Only three generic groups of this order are known, namely, the extinct Deinotherium, the equally extinct Mastodons, and the Elephants; and all these three types are known to have been in existence as early as the Miocene period, the first of them being exclusively confined to deposits of this age. . . . The most celebrated skull of the Deinothere is the one which was exhumed from the Upper Miocene deposits of Epplesheim, in Hesse-Darmstadt, in the year 1836. This skull was four and a half feet in length, and indicated an animal larger than any existing species of the Elephant. . . . Whilst herbivorous quadrupeds, as we have seen, were extremely abundant during Miocene times, and often attained gigantic dimensions, beasts of prey (Carnivora) were by no means wanting; most of the existing families of the order being represented. . . . Weasels and Otters were not unknown, . . . whilst the great Cats of subsequent periods are more than adequately represented by the huge 'sabre-toothed' Tiger. . . . Amongst the Rodent Mammals . . . all the principal living groups were differentiated in Middle Tertiary times. . . . Lastly, the Monkeys existed during the Miocene period under a variety of forms. . . . The Dryopithecus is referable to the group of 'Anthropoid Apes.' . . . Dryopithecus was also of large size, equaling Man in stature, and apparently living amongst the trees and feeding upon fruits." ¹

It would be easy to heighten the impression of this vigor and luxuriance of animal life in Tertiary and Post-tertiary times by studying the huge bird-tracks

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of the Connecticut sandstone, or the enormous skeletons of the Dinornis giganteus and the Dinornis elephantopus, or the eggs of the Æpiornis maximus,—eggs "measuring from thirteen to fourteen inches in diameter." ¹ We might consider the Diprotodon, which "in size must have many times exceeded the dimensions of the largest of its living successors, since the skull measures no less than three feet in length." ² Or we might rehabilitate the "colossal" Megatherium Cuvieri, whose "thigh-bone is nearly thrice the thickness of the same bone in the largest of existing Elephants." ³ Or, again, visiting the Jurassic beds of our own Colorado, we might contemplate the Titanosaurus, one of the latest discovered of the tenants of the early world, of which Sir John Lubbock says that it "is perhaps the largest land animal yet known, being a hundred feet in length, and at least thirty feet in height,

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though it seems possible that even these vast dimensions may have been surpassed by those of the Atlantosaurus," ¹ also a late discovery. But why multiply illustrations? Natural history in our times can produce no species of fishes, or of amphibians, or of reptiles, or of birds, or—among mammals—of marsupials, or of edentates, or of ungulates, or of proboscidians, or of carnivores, or of apes, which in normal dimensions are not excelled by species of the corresponding orders and classes belonging to Tertiary and Quaternary ages. And this being so, it is surely possible and credible that in the same antediluvian ages some of the varieties of the species Bimana may have exceeded in stature its present average, and enjoyed a corresponding vigor of constitution. At any rate, it will be soon enough to deny it after human remains of suitable age shall have been found in the vicinity of the race's origin and earlier history. So far as past findings are concerned, even Büchner, who holds that "primitive man was inferior even in corporeal attributes to the men of the present day," and that "the widely spread belief in the former existence of a race of human giants is perfectly erroneous," still has to say, "It is true that some very ancient skeletons or parts of skeletons have been found, which must have belonged to comparatively large and very muscular men, such, for example, as the skeleton of the famous Neanderthal man, and the human bones recently found by M. Louis Lartet in one of the caverns of Perigord, . . . which seem to indicate a rude but muscular race of men." ² Again, speaking of the

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skeleton to which the Neanderthal skull belongs, he says, "The ridges and crests especially which served as points for insertion of the muscles are very strongly developed, so that we may conclude that their possessor was a very strong and muscular man." ¹ It may be added that Carl Vogt, one of the earliest and most influential of Darwin's German disciples, also conceived of "the man of the oldest Stone Age" as "of large stature, powerful and long-headed." ²

Here it may be well to remark that the primitive forms of animals, while often so excelling in size the later forms of their own kind, are by no means to be thought of as monstrosities. The proportion of a young child's head to his body is very different from that of an adult's. In comparison with the grown man, his limbs and hands and feet are remarkably plump and well rounded. Had a painter never seen and studied a human being except in the adult and senescent stage, the infant form would seem to him singularly abnormal. This illustration may help to a right judgment of certain early types of animals. For "if we take the earliest known and oldest examples of any given group of animals, it can sometimes be shown that these primitive forms, though in themselves highly organized, possessed certain characters such as are now only seen in the young of their existing representatives. In technical language, the early forms of life in some instances possess 'embryonic' characters, though this does not prevent them often attaining a size much more gigantic than their nearest living relatives.

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Moreover, the ancient forms of life are often what is called 'comprehensive types;' that is to say, they possess characters in combination such as we nowadays only find separately developed in different groups of animals. Now this permanent retention of embryonic characters and this 'comprehensiveness' of structural type are signs of what a zoölogist considers to be a comparatively 'low' grade of organization; and the prevalence of these features in the earlier forms of animals is a very striking phenomenon, though they are none the less perfectly organized so far as their own type is concerned." ¹ To put the mistake to be guarded against in another light, it may be said that whoever considers the departures of the most ancient forms of animal life from the allied living forms as abnormal and monstrous in many cases simply takes the types of decadence and senility by which to test and condemn the plumper and fuller and fairer types of physical juvenility. In like manner, the "comprehensive" types can be called monstrous and strange only as these terms might be applied to the "London Times" by a man who in all his life had never seen any other specimen of journalism than "The North British Wool-Growers' Monthly Bulletin," or "The Daily Price-Current of the Southampton Associated Grocers." What the zoölogist calls the "lowest" forms of organization are rather the highest, if by "highest" we mean those forms which are most inclusive, lebenskräftig, and susceptible of evolutionary differentiation. ² The notion that the faunal world at

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the time of the advent of man was a world of crudities and monstrosities—a notion to which books and magazines of popularized science have given an almost universal currency—is therefore entirely false. ¹ In the light of profounder science, the fairest Eden of the oldest legend is, so far as primeval zoölogy is concerned, more credible than when the study of Paleontology was first begun.

It must not be forgotten that in all that has now been hinted respecting the fauna of the early world no account has been taken of more favorable and less favorable portions of the earth. Paleontologists are but just beginning to consider that between the biological conditions of the Arctic regions and those of every other portion of the globe there must have been, in Pre-Glacial times, the profoundest and most far-reaching difference. The growths of a region whose day was ten months in length, and whose night was but two, could not fail to be vastly different

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from those of the regions where, on the average, almost twelve hours of every twenty-four are spent in darkness. "Nor can we overlook the fact that the plants and shells of the Arctic region are eminently variable." ¹ If, therefore, in low latitudes the forms and powers of animal life were what we have seen, who can undertake to depict its superior exuberance and variety of manifestation in that primitive polar focus from which all faunal types proceeded! ²

The Arctic rocks tell of a more wonderful lost Atlantis than Plato's. The fossil ivory beds of Siberia excel everything of the kind in the world. From the days of Pliny, at least, they have constantly been undergoing exploitation, and still they are the chief headquarters of supply. ³ The remains

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of the mammoth are so abundant that, as Gratacap says, "the northern islands of Siberia seem built up of its crowded bones." ¹ Another scientific writer, speaking of the islands of New Siberia, northward of the mouth of the river Lena, uses this language: "Large quantities of ivory are dug out of the ground every year. Indeed, some of the islands are believed to be nothing but an accumulation of drift-timber and the bodies of mammoths and other antediluvian animals frozen together." ² So full of these remains is the soil of these high Arctic regions that the Ostyaks and other ignorant tribes have an idea that the mammoth is an underground animal ploughing his way through the earth like a mole, and that he still lives in his subterranean passages. Nor would there seem to be anything so remarkably novel in the theory we have advocated in this book, according to which the submergence of the primeval home of mankind and the introduction of the great Ice Age are connected with the Deluge: for when, nearly two hundred years ago, the Russian ambassador, Evert Yssbrants Ides, made his bold, three-year overland journey to China, he in the high North found and reported this precise traditionary belief. ³

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Summing up the present chapter, then, we have only to say that whoever accepts the conclusion to which the preceding lines of argument have conducted us will find no longer a stumbling-block in the latest revelations of Geology touching the extraordinary life-energies of far-off ages, and in the hoary myths which tell of giants and Titans and demigods in Earth's early morning. On the contrary, fossil form and ethnic myth and sacred page will all be found uniting in a common story.

Footnotes

279:1 Critias, III.

280:1 Darmesteter, i., p. 8. Haug, p. 227. It will be observed that the winter and summer here described are the exact counterpart or "counter-creation" of the original polar day (the growing season) of ten months, and the original polar night (or winter of rest from growth) of two months. This is another incidental evidence that "Iran the Ancient" was situate at the Pole.

280:2 "Or l’avènement de la période glaciaire pourrait seule expliquer un tel fait, car on ne connaît aucune autre cause capable de rendre inhabitable, à cause de froid, une contrée qui est representée comme ayant été à l’origine un pays d’excellente nature. On serait donc obligée d’en inférer que les Éraniens avestiques avaient conservé, non seulement le souvenir de la période glaciaire, mais aussi celui des beaux jours qui l’ont précédée, et c’est ce qu’en général on n’admittra pas facilement. L’âge d’or primitif n’est pas un souvenir traditionnel des temps préglaciaires," etc. Piétrement, Les Aryas et leur Première Patrie. Paris, 1879: p. 15. How near the truth!

281:1 Metamorphoses, i. 113.

281:2 Placidus, 4.

281:3 Satires, xv. 69, 70. Compare Homer, Iliad, v. 302 et seq.; Vergil, Æneid, xii. 900; Lucret., ii. 1151.

282:1 Critias, 120.

282:2 Laws of Manu, I. 68-86.

282:3 The Bundahish, chapters i., xxxi., xxxiv.

283:1 Fragments Cosmogoniques de Bérose. Ed. Lenormant. Frag. 17.

283:2 Beginnings of History, pp. 67, 73, note. See the entire chapter and the authorities there quoted. Also chapters vi. and vii., particularly pp. 351 et seq.

284:1 Lenormant, Beginnings of History, p. 354. The author continues, "To-day we have scientific proof that such belief [in the extraordinary stature of the early men] has no real foundation, but is simply a product of the imagination." But his alleged scientific proof is purely negative, consisting of the fact that the human skeletons which paleontologists have so far found—none of which are from the high North—are only of ordinary size. "As far back as we can trace the vestiges of mankind, up to the races who lived in the Quaternary period side by side with the great mammifers of extinct species, it may be proved that the medium height of our species has never exceeded its existent limits." If other early species of mammifers were gigantic in comparison with their nearest living representatives of to-day, why may not the mammifer man have illustrated the same law?

285:1 Ancient Life-History of the Earth. New York ed., 1878: p. 308.

285:2 The World before the Deluge, p. 134.

286:1 Nicholson, Life-History, p. 309.

287:1 During the Tertiary period the Sequoias "occurred all around the Arctic zone" (Asa Gray). Professor J. D. Whitney finds evidence that one of the fallen trees in Placer County was over 2000 years of age. See his Yosemite Book; also Engler, Entwickelungsgeschichte der Pflanzenwelt. Leipsic, 1879-82: chap. i. and ii. It is also noteworthy that the Australian Eucalyptus gigantea, the only tree which surpasses the Sequoia in height, is found precisely in that country whose belated living flora and fauna are more closely related to the northern types of the early world than are any other.

288:1 "We cannot gaze high up the huge and venerable trunks, which one crosses the continent to behold, without wishing that these patriarchs of the grove were able, like the long-lived antediluvians of Scripture, to hand down to us through a few generations the traditions of centuries, and so tell us somewhat of the history of their race. Fifteen hundred annual layers have been counted or satisfactorily made out upon one or two fallen trunks. It is probable that close to the heart of some of the living trees may be found the circle that records the year of the Saviour's nativity. A few generations of such trees might carry the history a long way back. But the ground they stand on and the marks of very recent geologic change and vicissitude in the region around testify that not very many such generations can have flourished just here, at least in unbroken series."—Professor Asa Gray, LL. D., "The Sequoia and its History." Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1872, p. 6.

291:1 Nicholson, Life-History, pp. 311 et seq.

292:1 The fact that fossil remains of these gigantic extinct birds have been found only in the Southern hemisphere militates in no wise against the doctrine that the species originated in the highest North. For (1) birds are the best equipped of all creatures for migration to the remotest parts of the earth. (2.) The Connecticut Valley sandstones, in the Northern hemisphere, preserve the tracks of birds "which must have been of colossal dimensions," the tracks being 22 inches in length and 12 in breadth, with a proportionate length of stride. "These measurements indicate a foot four times as large as that of the African Ostrich." (3.) These tracks were made in the Triassic period, while the remains found in New Zealand and adjacent regions belong to the much more recent Post-pliocene period, thus giving a long lapse of years for the spread or migration of the species from the latitude of the Connecticut Valley to that of the most Southern lands. Compare Geikie: "The higher fauna of Australia is more nearly akin to that which flourished in Europe far back in Mesozoic time than to the living fauna of any other region of the globe." Geology, p. 619.

292:2 Nicholson, Life-History, p. 349.

292:3 Ibid., p. 350.

293:1 Nature. London, 1881: p. 406.

293:2 Man in the Past, Present, and Future. Eng. tr. by Dallas, pp. 50, 51.

294:1 Man in the Past, Present, and Future, p. 53.

294:2 Ibid., pp. 60, 259.

295:1 Nicholson, Life-History, pp. 60, 61. Compare pp. 367-374.

295:2 "The first appearance of leading types of life are rarely embryonic. On the contrary, they often appear in highly perfect and specialized forms; often, however, of composite type, and expressing p. 296 characters afterwards so separated as to belong to higher groups. . . . The bald and contemptuous negation of these facts by Haeckel and other biologists does not tend to give geologists much confidence in their dicta."—Principal J. W. Dawson, in his "Presidential Address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science." Science, Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 17, 1883: p. 195.

296:1 "Dr. Hooker observes, in his recent introductory essay on the Flora of Australia, that it is impossible to establish a parallel between the successive appearances of vegetable forms in time and their complexity of structure or specialization of organs as represented by the successively higher groups in the natural method of classification. He also adds that the earliest recognizable cryptograms are not only the highest now existing, but have more highly differentiated vegetative organs than any subsequently appearing, and that the dicotyledonous embryo and perfect exogenous wood, with the highest specialized tissue known (the coniferous with glandular tissue), preceded the monocotyledonous embryo and endogenous wood in date of appearance on the globe,—facts wholly opposed to the doctrine of progression."—Sir Charles Lyell, The Antiquity of Man, p. 404.

297:1 Charles Darwin, Animals and Plants under Domestication. New York, 1868: ii. 309.

297:2 This "eminent" variableness of Arctic life has its bearing upon the scientific credibility of prehistoric Arctic giants. At the present day, and in our own latitudes, men occasionally appear whose stature is four or five times the height of the smallest adult dwarfs. Accordingly, if we were to assume two and one half feet as the minimum adult stature in polar regions in primeval times, the still prevailing range of variation would give us in those times some men from seven and one half to twelve and one half feet in height. Possibly new fossil evidence on this point is soon to be afforded us. The following is going the rounds of the daily press: "A Carson (Nev.) dispatch says, The footprints which were so much discussed in this country and Europe, and which were originally pronounced by Dr. Harkness, of the Academy of Sciences, to be those of mammoths, are now stated by him, after a year's examination, to be only those of big-footed men." See Proceedings of the California Academy of Science, 1882 (Aug. 7 and 27, Sept. 4, Oct. 2). Nadaillac, in Matériaux pour l’Histoire primitive et naturelle de l’Homme. Paris, 1882: pp. 313-321. Topinard, in Revue d’Anthropologie. Paris, 1883: pp. 309-320. Also Mr. Cope, in The American Naturalist, Philadelphia, 1883.

297:3 Von Middendorff (Reise im Norden and Osten Siberiens, 1848) reckons the number of the tusks which now annually come into the market as at least a hundred pairs, on which Nordenskjöld remarks: p. 298 "From this we may infer that during the years that have elapsed since the Russian conquest of Siberia, useful tusks from more than 20,000 mammoths have been collected." In a note the same writer expresses the opinion that Von Middendorff's estimate is quite too low, and says that a single steamer on which he sailed up the Yenisej in 1875 was on that single trip taking more than one hundred tusks to market. The Voyage of the Vega, p. 305.

298:1 "Prehistoric Man in Europe." The Am. Antiquarian and Oriental Journal. Chicago, 1881: p. 284.

298:2 Johnson's Cyclopædia, sub voce.

298:3 "The old Russians living in Siberia were of opinion that the mammoth was an animal of the same kind as the elephant, and that before the Flood Siberia had been warmer than now, and elephants had then p. 299 lived in numbers there; that they had been drowned in the Flood, and afterwards, when the climate became colder, had frozen in the river mud." Nordenskjöld, Voyage of the Vega, p. 305.