Pre-Historic Man.

The following lecture, the last of the series given during the Winter of 1869, in connection with the Early Closing Association, was delivered by the Rev. J. E. Bromby, D.D., in the Princess Theater, to a large and appreciative audience. Upon the stage were a number of clergymen and scientific gentlemen, amongst whom were the following : His Lordship the Bishop of Melbourne (in the chair), the Revs. M. H. Beecher, H. H. P. Hand field, J. S. Waugh, I. Moore, S.J., J. Potter, D. MacDonald, Dr. Tucker, Professor M'Coy, Geo. Foord, Esq., Dr. Barker, E. Gill, Esq. J.P., D. O'Donovan, Esq., Dr. Thomson, Captain Amsinck.

Dr. Bromby said:—

It is my duty this evening, my friends, to discourse to you for an hour or so on our fellow-man before he emerges into the light of history—or man still wandering in the dim twilight of tradition; or even in times still earlier, while the vestiges which tell of his existence are few and far between—rude implements of stone maybe, or bones which he has once dined off and then thown aside. But in this long line of our primæval ancestry where must I begin ? Why, of course, many of you will say, begin with Adam. Adam ! But then you must remember that the Hebrew word Adam means only man; nothing more, and nothing less. And to begin my story of man by allusions to man, would be very like reasoning in a circle—the act of the tipsy cripple, who, having got his wooden leg into a plug-hole, went on walking round and round the stump. It is true the Bible translators have assumed a very arbitrary power in dealing with this word Adam. In the very same verse, or in consecutive verses, they translate it into man, and they transfer it untranslated; but in the original Hebrew it is just the same. The first time it occurs in Scripture is in the 1st chapter of Genesis—"And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness." But they might just as well have written, "Let us make Adam in our image." All that we can learn from Scripture is that God created man by a special fiat of his own. He made him out of the dust of the ground, but without showing how the elements were put together, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. This, I say, is all the Bible teaches; it deals only with the religious aspect of things; its element of inspiration is concerned only with the spirit. "The kingdom of God consisteth not in meat and drink." "Flesh and blood shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven." If anything of science transpires through the pages of Scripture, it is in light from that far horizon where science and religion meet—strange forms looming dimly in grandest outline, overwhelming us by their dread and awe-inspiring shadows, or dazzling us with the jewelled brightness of the mere skirts of the Almighty's clothing. And as with science, so with history. It is just the same. Holy writ does not profess to teach us history as such. Even those parts of Scripture which usually go by the name of the historic books are always classed as part of the prophetic writings in that threefold division—the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. They are selections made by the prophets in their sacred colleges at Bethel and Jericho, from the chronicles of the time, to illustrate God's dealings with the world. Would you know more than this? As for instance, would you know "the rest of the acts of Ahah, and all that he did, and the ivory houses which he made, and all the cities which he built?" Then they tell you distinctly that you must go elsewhere for your information. "Are they not written in the book of the chronicles of the Kings of Israel?" i. e., in those public annals which were kept by the Government recorder. Take a glance now at the chronology of Scripture. With what perfect indifference does it treat all such accurate calculations, upon which we are disposed to lay such page 4 immense stress when we reckon up the years and the ages that are passed. We read in the first chapter of Matthew that there were fourteen generations between David and the Captivity, and the individual names in the pedigree are recorded one by one; but when we turn to the Old Testament history, we find all these name indeed, but discover that there are three others deliberately left out by the evangelist, and that, too, for no good reason that can be assigned. Nor is there any deception intended in this; it was simply the custom of the people, with which inspiration did not interfere. Examples abound. Take this:—Laban is said to be the son of Bethuel, and Bethuel the son of Nahor, and yet we find repeatedly that Laban is called the son of Nahor. It came to the same thing in the mind of a Hebrew historian. Then, again, forty years seem to serve for any period of a man's life which did not happen to be known exactly. Isaac married Rebecca when he was forty years old; Esau married Judith when he was forty years old; Moses visited his brethren when he was forty years old; Israelites dwelt in the wilderness forty years. At the time of the Judges the land had rest, twice under Othniel and under Gideon, each time forty years; and was under the domination of the Philistines forty years. Eli judged Israel just forty years. Saul, David, Solomon, each reigned just forty years, and many others; and what is true of forty years is also true of forty days. In short, it is quite clear it was a mere habit they had of contenting themselves with a proximate round number, without caring to be precise.

If, then, chronology is not taught in Scripture, what shall we say of its history ? In one respect it is quite as good without the chronology as with it. For spiritual truth does not depend upon times and seasons; indeed, it would appear that in some eases it is deteriorated by them, for the observance of these may degenerate into superstition. And so St. Paul remonstrates with the Galatians, "Ye observe days and months, and times and years; I am afraid of you." But the great spiritual truth is, that the times of all of us are in God's hand. So spake the prophet Daniel in that magnificent exordium to his interpretation of Belshazzar's dream—" Blessed be the name of God for ever and ever; for wisdom and might are His, and He changeth the times and the seasons." And what is true of chronology is as true of every other branch of human knowledge. We have now long ceased to fear lest Galileo's telescope should undermine the basis of religion; and though, to be sure, a similar panic from time to time returns whenever Science penetrates deeper into any of the arcana of nature—as geology did in the last age, and as everything, from positivism to protoplasm, does in this—yet Religion still holds her own, and never did she number in her ranks more men distinguished for science and research than she does at this very moment. In dealing, then, with the Scriptural account of man's creation, while we should always approach the sacred precincts reverentially, and, in imagination, put off our shoes from off our feet, for the place whereon we stand is holy ground, yet truth demands of us that we should not keep our eyes hoodwinked, but rather watch with an almost jealous suspicion lest the conventional traditions of man might displace what are really and truly the averments of the Written Word. Spiritual things can be discerned only by the spirit within us; but intelligible things come within the scope of the eye of the understanding, and are left to be made out by our own research.

On opening the Bible, in its earliest chapters, the first thing that strikes us is that there are at least two distinct accounts of man's creation, just as in opening the New Testament we see there are four distinct accounts of our Lord's ministry and death. And just as, in the four gospels, where we find discrepancies in detail—as we do—we infer that such detail must be immaterial, so ought we to infer the same in the differing accounts of the creation.

In the first account of man's creation, which concludes with the third verse of the second chapter of Genesis, the Divine Creator is called by the simple name of God (Elohim). In the second account he is called by a more august title—the Lord God (Jehovah Elohim). The first commences with that pregnant phrase "In the beginning," and culminates in the statement, "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." The second commences with the customary formula, "These are the generations of the heaven and the earth." and evinces its fragmentary character by the circumstance that, although it speaks of the page 5 creation of plants and herbs, it omits all mention of animals, but records the creation of man thus, "The Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life." Some Hebrew scholars have supposed the passage beginning with the fifth chapter to be a third record. It certainly commences with the formula, "This is the book of the generation of man," but, for all that, may be a resumption of the first document, which had been broken by the interposition of the second. It speaks of the creation of man in much the same terms, but is remarkable for speaking of both sexes under the same name—man; "Male and female created he them, and blessed them, and called their name Adam;" showing that Adam could not, there at least, be a proper name.

Before leaving this portion of Scripture there is one term—"garden"—which needs a passing notice. It does not mean a small enclosure planted with flowers, but a large extensive park. The word which the Greek translators employed to represent the Paradise. These paradises were common enough in the East. They were the parks or hunting-grounds of the powerful monarchs of the Babylonish and Persian dynasties. They contained also choice trees of every kind, both for ornament and delight. When the Jews returned from the Babylonish captivity, they received grants from the Persian monarchs of the privilege to cut down timber in the royal paradises during the rebuilding of their city. The meaning of the writer would therefore be that the place where man commenced his existence upon earth was a natural park of vast extent, where edible fruits and wild animals abounded. Here would he find himself in the midst of every comfort, abundance of nutritious fruit, and venison to be had for the hunting. And it is a remarkable fact also, which we may note in passing, that almost all our fruit trees with which this day our gardens and orchards are stocked—apples, pears, figs, peaches, plums, vines, nay, even our coffee and our tea—all derive their origin from the East, emanating, it would appear, from that great garden of the Lord. While man lived in this delightful region, he lived in comparative innocence. He was, at all events, conscious of no sin. He could do no great wrong, and at first there would be no great temptation. This state of things then corresponded with the far-famed golden age, of which nearly every nation of antiquity held a tradition. This was tho happy legendary period when Oromasdes reigned in Persia, Osiris in Egypt, Saturn in Italy, and Ogyges in Greece. I say legendary; it could not be historic, for reasons obvious enough; for not only had people not taught themselves letters, in such uneventful times there was really no history to write.

It is easy to see how rapidly, under such circumstances, people would multiply in the earth, and as people multiplied food would become proportionately scarce; and now man, instead of hunting down the sheep as game, would begin to pasture them in flocks. These would become his property, his wealth. The old Latin word for money (pecunia) is an immediate derivation from pecus, sheep—the earliest representative of riches The next phase, after the nomadic and pastoral, would be the agricultural. In this young country we have an example of this. The squatter is driven off the face of the land by the selector, and thus it comes to pass the words of Scripture about Abel, the keeper of sheep, being killed by Cain, the tiller of the ground, seem almost to bear an allegorical sense, in addition to their primary one. This it is which lies at the root of that far-famed struggle for the Agrarian law which forms the leading feature of early Roman history, as soon as ever it emerges from the legendary period. Now, in order to show how rapidly Scripture passes over these preliminary stages of human life, it is but necessary to mention that Cain, the eldest son of Adam, is represented as building a city, and calling that city by the name of his eldest son, Enoch. Yes! even Cain builds a city—the first man after Adam.

But some will no doubt be disposed to remind me of the great length of time that men then lived, and therefore of the possibility of men becoming numerous enough even in two generations to build cities and live in towns. Let us discuss that topic next. All the days that Adam lived were 930 years; all the days that Enos lived were 905 years; and so on till we come down to the oldest of them, Methuselah, who lived 969 years. Now I have no hesitation in saying at once that I concur in the suggestion that these years are nothing but months, and these are my reasons:—In the first place, page 6 the Hebrew word for year, (though not, indeed, so used elsewhere) will very easily bear that meaning. Let me show you an illustration. When we meet with the word week, we think only of seven days,—from Sunday morning, it may be, till Saturday night; for that is its only meaning in English. But the Hebrew word for week conveys quite a different—idea. It means merely a bundle of 7—a hebdomad. A Hebrew could quite as easily speak of a week of weeks or a week of years as he could a week of days. The context decides it when the latter now is omitted; and when we read that Jacob served a week for Laban and another week for Rachel nobody doubts but that the writer meant seven years in either case and not seven days. Now when we come to the word for a year, we find it to be a similar derivative from the number 2. The verb derived from it is to repeat—to begin at the same point and go over the same ground again. There can hardly be any doubt then that the original meaning of the Hebrew word for year was a revolution, as we call it—that is, the revolution of the sun through the seasons of the year. But in the primitive meaning of the word it might apply equally well to a revolution of the moon; and we must bear in mind too that in subtropical countries the revolutions of the moon are far more obvious and easy to be observed than the revolutions of the sun. In high latitudes indeed, where the snow lies deep upon the ground every winter, the revolutions of the seasons are obvious enough; but in that region which we have every reason to believe was the cradle of humanity this is by no means the case; and men would first begin to reckon the lapse of time by lunar periods, and

"Count their birthdays by the moon."

The word annus in Latin, from which we have our English word annual, meant only a great circle or ring; hence another English word, annular, [unclear: orring-shaped]. Admitting then that the word originally meant merely a reiterated period of time, as its derivation implies, it would stand in the earliest records of mankind for a month, but when later language appropriated it solely to a year, the earlier records would be exposed to misinterpretation, especially when a translation had to be made from one dialect to another. A ludicrous mistake of this order actually occurs in that very interesting account which the truth-loving Herodotus has left us of his travels. He had wandered (he tells us) northwards through Media till he arrived on the borders of Scythia, and not feeling disposed to travel further into those inclement regions, he contented himself with gathering all the information he could of what was further to the north from those who were resident on the spot. They told him—first you will come to such a country, then to such a country, till at last you come to parts which are utterly uninhabitable, because the air is filled with feathers. Though Herodotus puts this last statement down, he tells us with the utmost gravity that he don't believe it. And yet what doubt can there be but that these feathers in the Scythian language meant nothing more than flakes of snow ? So in like manner, when we read that Adam, or primæval man, lived 930 years, we may, like Herodotus, assume a solemn face and say "we don't believe it." But divide this number 930 by the number of lunations in a year, and we have as the result a trifle more than seventy five years, and seventy-three years is the average age of all of them, except of Enoch, who died by this calculation at the age of thirty. But of his early death we have intimation in the expressive language that he walked with God, and was not, for God took him. Methuselah, the oldest of them, was just seventy eight. All this is very natural. But now arises a difficulty. On turning to the numbers again, we find that Adam begat a when son he was 130 years old. Consider these 130 years as months, and we find that ten and a half years was the age of the father when Seth his third son was born. Or, if Adam's case be thought peculiar, take that of Enoch, who was sixty five when his eldest son was born. Turn the sixty-five months into years, and this would make Enoch just five and a quarter years old when the nurse brought to him the little Methusaleh for his blessing. But mark now, when I turn to the Septuagint translation of the Scriptures—a work quite as authentic as the Hebrew—a version accepted by all the Jews prior to the Christian era who understood Greek, constantly quoted by Josephus, generally by the writers in the New Testament, and by all the Greek fathers, when—I say, I turn to the Septuagint, I find that all these page 7 patriarchs when their children are born are just 100 years older, with the exception of Jared and Lamech, and their ages in the Hebrew are far the largest in the list. So that, if these numbers are to be relied on, men in those days died at an average age of seventy five, and became fathers at an average age of fourteen or fifteen. And that I think not unlikely in a hot country, and when trousseaux were very inexpensive. I cannot leave these sacred pages of Scripture without once more reminding my hearers that their object is not to teach either history or science; and perhaps no stronger proof could be given of this than the manner in which they present their opening view of per-historic man. That it is pregnant with vastly deeper meaning than mere history is discernible at a glance. The very names of the trees which grow in the garden of Eden—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and the tree of life—are palpably allegorical; and the serpent speaking with human voice, as in the didactic fables of sage antiquity, bears testimony to the same fact. The condensed wisdom of these early chapters of inspiration is not history, and yet contains the quintessence of all the histories of all the peoples of the world up to the time of Abraham. If all those histories had been written in full, with their myriads of facts, and then translated into every speech and language under heaven, we may indeed say, in the words of the apostle John, "that the world itself would not contain the books that should be written." To show the necessity for condensing knowledge for the use of ordinary men take this illustration from natural history :—There are said to be no less than 40,000 different species of beetles preserved in the cabinet cases of scientific museums, each species with a different scientific name, and each having some specialty with which the entomologist is acquainted. What a tax upon the memory to recollect them all; and yet all the wisdom contained in these 40,000 learned names is sufficiently condensed for the use of ordinary men into that one word "beetle." When, then, Abel, the keeper of sheep, was gone, and Cain had built his city Enoch, a portion of mankind had passed from a nomadic to what we should call a more civilized condition of life. Well might he be said at this juncture to have tasted of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. It is are through many chapters that Scripture passes before we are favored with a peep into the interior of one of these ancient cities. Yes, my friends, great as are the advantages of civilisation, these advantages are purchased at a fearful price. To this all the degrading vices, which spring up in towns like poisonous weeds, bear saddest witness. The knowledge of good and evil may raise men to a higher level in the scale of intellectual being, as no doubt it does—they become as gods, knowing good and evil, but they fall from a state of comparate innocence. And were it not that religion here steps in with its curative and regenerative virtues, it might well be said of most men, "far better were it that they had never known civilisation;" and of some, "far better that they had never been born." Is not that splendid Oriental metaphor true to this hour of many daughters of Eve, that, listening to the serpent's voice, and tasting of forbidden fruit, that very day they die.

If, now, we turn from the pages of Scripture, and address ourselves to study the history of our species by such tokens as we can discern with our own eyes upon the surface of the earth, the task becomes long and painful. Here a stone utensil, there a broken bone, tells a portion of the tale; even the manner in which a nutshell has been cracked, taken in connection with the matrix which imbeds the relic, conveys a meaning; and the laboriously traced etymologies of the earliest written languages serve as beacons in wandering through the dark recesses of the past. It requires, therefore, much enduring perseverance, coupled with great soberness of judgment, on the part of the enthusiastic antiquarian, before he can crystallise his many scattered facts into the transparent gem of truth. It is pleasant enough, as you sit in your easy-chair, to concoct all sorts of crude theories out of the Scripture text; but to dive to the bottom of a bone cave, where all is moist and dark, and ever and anon chill drippings from above find their way into your neck-hole, and day after day nothing perhaps to reward you for your pains, is a very different thing. Hoc opus, hic labor est. It reminds me of an anecdote of a painstaking English past or who had taught an aged parishioner to read, and inquired one day of the wife how the old man got on in reading his Bible. "Bible," she says, "bless you, sir, he has got out of the Bible and into page 8 the newspapers long ago." The traces of man's primæval existence upon earth are, as we might have expected, faint and few, but where met with exceedingly significant. They extend in some sort over the whole face of the earth, and backwards in point of time to a period so remote that the 6,000 years estimated by Archbishop Ussher from the Scripture records, sink into utter insignificance. This branch of study is quite new It began to dawn with the first year of the present century, when a Mr. John Frere discovered near Diss, in Suffolk, certain flints, which he tells us "were evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. They lay in great numbers at the depth of about twelve feet of a stratified soil, which was dug into for the purpose of clay for bricks. . . . The manner in which the flint weapons lay would lead to the persuasion that it was a place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit. Their numbers were so great that the man who carried on the brick work, before he became aware of their being objects of curiosity, had emptied basketsful of them into the ruts of the adjoining road." Some of these implements are now in the British Museum. Possibly some of my hearers may have seen them; I have not. But another collection—one of the finest in the world I was told at that time—was in process of formation in the island of Guernsey during my residence there. A local antiquary—Mr. Lucas—conceived the idea of digging into the floors of what are sometimes called Druids' altars—the cromlechs. These altars, which are really places of sepulture, and abound in the Channel Islands, are rude structures of massive stones, placed upright round small enclosures, and roofed over with enormous ponderous slabs. Here they have stood for untold centuries, and the race of men which built them has completely passed away. Mr. Lucas's labours were rewarded by the discovery of a large number of these stone tools (Celts, as they call them, from the Latin celtis, a chisel), various in shape, and evidently intended to be applied to uses as different from each other as that of a hatchet from a razor. One would be notched that it might be fastened to a stick, and then used either as a hammer or an axe, according as the blunt side or the sharp one might be turned forward. Some would be spearheads. But there were others of much finer make and polish, and capable of performing such work as is now done by knife or scissors. The edge of them is so sharp, notwithstanding the number of centuries which have rolled over since they were deposited, that if you should heedlessly run your thumb over the edge it would at once cut you to the quick. Such, then, are among the earliest tools which man taught himself to use at the time when the first wave or two of population was spreading itself over the earth. We in this era of the world's existence, are still able to assist our imagination by studying localities where these first waves of population still exist—e. g., among the Bosjesmen and Hottentots of South Africa, or even on our own continent. But they are now rapidly passing away. When the West India Islands were first discovered they swarmed with the aboriginal inhabitants—inoffensive people, lying lazily under the trees, and apparently happy as the day was long. But now not a man is left. Many of the savage races with which we have come in contact—as for example, the Kaffirs in Africa, the red men in America, and the New Zealanders, are not the first but the second wave of population.

Now what is it which proves the great antiquity of man ? It is partly the bones of animals found simultaneously deposited with these relics of him, and partly geological changes which have since taken place, and the time of which we are able in some degree to measure. Even Mr. Frere, at the beginning of the century, mentioned that in the stratum of sand above the gravel where they found the stone tools there lay "the jaw-bone and teeth of an enormous unknown animal—i. e., unknown then, but had it been preserved till now, probably Professor Owen would have told us more about it. Within the last thirty years many similar gravel strata, and many bone caves, have been carefully searched both in England and France; and great precaution taken to ascertain exactly the manner in which these relics of man's handiwork are associated with the hones of extinct animals. These extinct animals are usually of large size. There were two species of European elephant—the e. primigenius, and the e. antiquus. There was a hippopotamus, and a woolly rhinoceros or two; there were bears and hyenas in abundance, besides gigantic deer page 9 and oxen, bisons, wolves, and swine. Let me quote the case of the famous Brixham cave in Devon shire, three or four miles west of Torquay. At the bottom was a very perfect flint tool, and at a higher level was a very perfect leg of an extinct species of bear, which must have been deposited there when the sinews were entire, for every bone was in its proper place, even the knee-pan; and overlying all was a solid crust of hard stalagmite, requiring a pickaxe to break through, and itself containing a reindeer's horn, and the bone of an extinct bear—of a bear that is of a species now nowhere to be found in the world. And though, to be sure, reindeer still exist, yet if you were to bring from Lapland any number of them to Brixham, they would sicken and die in a few months The experiment was tried in Scotland. Now what we have particularly to observe is, that the Brixham cave is not an isolated instance of the sort, but the type of a multitude of others. In short, every year is adding to the testimony we already possess, that a very long time ago man, in his primitive condition, before he had found out the use of any metal whatever, was spread over all Europe; and that, at the same period, there lived elephants and rhinoceroses, and gigantic deer of a sort which now are nowhere to be found, being readily distinguishable from those of Asia and of Africa by the corrugation of their teeth.

Now it may be urged that the disappearance of these huge animals does not of itself necessarily indicate any great lapse of time. When the Cape of Good Hope was first colonised by the Dutch, only two centuries ago, animals as gigantic as the e. antiquus swarmed in the rivers and forests of Southern Africa; but they have all disappeared before the advance of man for hundreds of miles to the northward. But then, on the other hand, we must recollect that it would take many more centuries for a sparse and feeble race, whose deadliest weapons were stone hatchets, or arrows tipped with flint, to destroy these huge pachyderms than it would a flowing stream of European immigrants, agricultural in their habits, and armed with first-rate Manton rifles—so much more time, indeed, that many advocates of the briefer existence of man have preferred to attribute their disappearance from the fauna of Europe to geological changes of the earth's crust. But even then, if we do resort to geology, we shall have to draw very largely on the great bank of time for such phenomena to take place; for all geological evidence goes to prove that whatever occurred in those ancient eras occurred quietly, or at all events with no more violent cataclysms and disruptions than are occurring from time to time somewhere on the earth's surface now.

But let us turn to another page of man's primeval story. Denmark is particularly rich in the tokens it furnishes of the great antiquity of aboriginal man in Europe. The shores of nearly all Scandinavia, especially the Danish islands, are dotted with large mounds of shells—oyster-shells, cockle-shells, mussels, and periwinkles, interspersed with stone implements, and with bones of animals, which have had the gristle gnawed off the ends. The Danes call these mounds Kyöken-mödding—words which we have in our own language slightly modified in sound—Kyöken being identical with kitchen, and mödding with midden, or the manure-heap, which used to stand, and probably still stands, near almost every rural cottage in the north of England. The name is exceedingly expressive, for they were evidently the kitchen refuse-heaps of the Danish aborigines. There is no mistaking their being the relics of many an excellent dinner. The bones are almost all broken in a peculiar way for the extraction of the marrow, and then given to the domestic dogs to feed upon. Similar bones have been given to modern dogs to test this point, and are always left in precisely the same state. These mounds are, some of them 1,000 feet long by above 200 broad, and from three to ten feet high. Take an average of five feet high, and this gives us just 1,000,000 cubic feet in one single mound. And if we suppose a cubic inch of shell to have furnished a decent mouthful of fish, that would give us just 144,000,000 mouthfuls in one single mound. But we must remember we are only calculating the oyster-sauce; there is plenty of evidence to prove that many a good steak of red-deer and of roe supplied the pièces de resistance at these primitive feasts. So that whatever it was which caused these ancient people to disappear, they do not seem to have been starved out. Now, what evidence can we extract from these mounds to indicate the lapse of time? It is this :—The oyster shells, and especially the mussel shells, page 10 are much larger—about twice the size of the same species of shell found in that neighbourhood now, the diminution in size being due to the deficiency of salt in the Baltic water. Clearly, therefore, in the lapse of pre-historic ages the Danish coast line must have undergone some geological change which has blocked up once-existing channels, and excluded the full tide of salt water which must have once flowed in from the German Sea. But this is not all. When we extend our examination from the shells to the bones found in the refuse" heaps in order to ascertain the kind of animals these Danish aborigines consorted with, we find they are all of recent species. No mammoth, no rhinoceros bones, but those of roe and red deer, of lynx, and fox, and wolf—all animals found in Europe still. There is, to be sure, one apparent exception—the urus, or wild bull, which now has disappeared; but we must remember that the urus is not prehistoric, for Julius Cæsar, the first invader of Britain, has left us a full description of it, so that, like the dodo, it lived into historic times. Old, then, as these Danish-mound people were, they were not so old as those bone-cave people of Brixham, or those of the gravel drifts, who were contemporaneous with bears and mammoths and hyenas of extinct sorts. And this inference is further corroborated by the comparison of the stone implements of the two peoples. For of that earliest race of man, the Hints are so rude that it is sometimes difficult for any but a practiced eye to see that they are implements at all; but in the mounds their edges are ground to greater nicety, showing a marked progress in such civilisation as these ancient peoples were capable of.

And now comes in a further proof of progressive advancement. There are in Denmark, besides these shell-mounds, certain peat bogs varying in depth from ten o thirty feet which have been accumulated in hollows which once were swamps, like those on the banks of the Yarra. Now the lowest stratum of this peat is composed entirely of swamp mosses. Above this another growth of peat, but no longer exclusively of swamp plants. We must observe this stratified character of the bogs, for it proves that they are in the state in which they were originally formed, and not like some Irish bogs, which, conceiving a passion for travel, go on moving at a certain slow pace, and fill up all the hollows which they cross. In these Danish bogs everything is in situ; and imbedded in the peat are found trunks of trees which have grown on the margin of the swamps, lived to a good old age, for many are three feet in diameter, and then fallen in. From these trees we are able, without much cross-examination, to extort some very important testimony. For in the lowest stratum the principal tree is the Scotch fir, and yet that tree has long ceased to be a denizen of the Danish islands. There is no record of its ever being teen there in historic times, and when curious acclimatises try to plant it there now, it will not thrive. From some unknown cause, some gradual upheaval of the continent—so gradual as to have left the swamp still a swamp, and yet sufficient to have shut out a certain atmospheric stimulus—shut out, we will suppose, the benign influences of the Gulf-stream, which produce those splendid mists which Scotchmen love so much—whatever the cause, all these fir trees in course of time died out in Denmark, and were superseded by two species of oak in succession, both of which still grow in England. But the change did not stop here, but, as the ages rolled, the oaks disappeared in turn, and gave place to the common beech, which, within historic times, has been the great prevailing tree throughout Denmark.

Now, here is the place to introduce the single connecting link which gives significance to all these curious facts. It is this :—In the very lowest stratum of one bog, and under the prostrate trunk of a veritable Scotch fir, which had lain there undisturbed so many untold centuries, Professor Steenstruss (of Copenhagen) took out with his own hands a stone hatchet. To estimate, then, the antiquity of this venerable relic is the problem before us, and is identical with that of reckoning up the centuries which it must have taken the races of trees we have been speaking of to be successively exterminated. True, we are familiar enough with examples of this kind of extermination. A crop of this tiles will soon exterminate a crop of wheat. The common rat, which is now in all our sewers, was never seen in Europe till it crossed the Wolga, after an earthquake in 1727; but so much stronger was it than its softer cousin, the old black rat, which previously had occupied all the available rat-holes on the Continent, that it page 11 speedily extinguished him. Nay, not content with having all the continent of Europe to himself, he quickly comes to Hamburg, finds there a vessel bound for London—coolly puts his wife and family on board at dead of night—and, the voyage over, as coolly brings them all ashore at swapping. That's just the way he came to Melbourne. And now the brown rat is everywhere, and the black rat nowhere—all within less than a century and a half. But was this the rate, I ask, at which whole forests of Scotch fir gave way to oaks, and then the oaks to beeches? Certainly not. Thistle-down flies fast and far; and there are other weeds which, though possessing no wings of their own, can borrow the wings of birds which feed on them; for not only is their vitality not destroyed by passing through the alimentary canal, but, like guano-sown grain, they have their fertility increased. Not so with the acorn. Every new generation of oaks must grow within that narrow forest-border over which the highest wind can blow the acorn as it falls; and they must grow to maturity before they in turn can shed their fruit. And yet Denmark has three times changed its forests ! What countless winters, then, must have annually shed their coverlets of snow on those wondrous swamps which tell of these progressive changes! And, what is very striking—as the forests of different trees succeed each other, so also do tokens exhibit themselves of the progressive advancement of man; for in the Scotch-fir period we find him using stone implements and living upon shell-fish and venison; but when the oaks have superseded the fir-trees, then bronze implements appear for the first time, together with bones of sheep and oxen. The conclusion of the whole record, then, is this:—The lowest stratum of peat presents us with indications of man existing in no higher condition than he was when the huge pachyderms roamed the continent; but we trace him through this early Scotch-fir period refining himself into the practice of polishing his stone tools for finer workmanship, and, probably, for the richer ornamentation of his person. But when the lapse of centuries has brought round the oaks, then he has risen to the higher civilisation of bronze utensils; and bronze, of course, brings us to the borders of reliable history.

Now, here we may pause to remark upon the very interesting fact that just when these stone implements of remote antiquity had begun, within these few years, to attract the attention of the antiquary, the stone period of existing peoples should be just passing away. When Tasmania was first discovered the aborigine of that island could be seen manufacturing his stone knives with great dexterity, and of a type closely resembling those which the Scandinavian aborigine manufactured such an incalculably long time ago. Picking up a likely stone, he would deftly chip off one side a few flakes and leave the other round for the hand to hold by. That was his knife, and when the edge was blunted he would fling it away and make another. But he has just ceased to be a living illustration. The last Tasmanian man died only the other day. (You read in the papers, I dare say, how some enthusiastic savant went in the darkness of the night and took his skull; and public propriety was shocked, and all with one accord cried fie ! But really it is difficult to see what ought to have been done. It was clearly wrong to walk off surreptitiously with the poor fellow's head, but then would it not have been equally wrong not to have secured it, in the cause of antiquarian science? Perhaps the happy medium would have best been hit by dividing the cranium in two parts, polishing one half for the Hobart Town museum, and burying the other under the altar of decency.) Living, I say, as we do at this peculiar era, when the stone age is passing away from the remotest corner of the earth, we resemble Moses on the top of Pisgah, and see from the same stand-point two totally distinct phases of human existence. The wilderness of the stone period, so to speak, we have left for ever, and yet it reaches to the very base of the mountain on which we stand. We have had the opportunity of verifying by ocular inspection what the degree of civilisation is which these stone utensils indicate. Those old aboriginal inhabitants of England and France whose implements are found sepulchred with the bones of rhinoceros and elephant in the gravel drift would be very much in the condition of the rude Tasmanian race who are just passing away. (Women remain.) Whereas the polished implements of the peat bog immediately prior to the introduction of bronze so closely resemble those of present Polynesian and Maori workmanship that we page 12 may estimate pretty fairly the kind of men who peopled Scandinavia before the oak had been exterminated by the beech. In a few years the opportunity of making this comparison by ocular inspection of living races will have passed away.

We must now take a rapid glance at Switzerland. In the winter of 1853-4 an unusual drought reduced the waters of all the Swiss lakes to a level lower than the oldest inhabitant could remember. The thrifty people resolved to turn the occasion to account, and to redeem some portion of the lake by doing what was done in the Botanic-gardens here during the last dry summer—raising some parts by deepening others. But the work was no sooner begun than the diggers came upon piles of wood driven into the mud, in which mud were also found a great many celts—axes and hammers and other tools, all in first-rate condition. In short, they had discovered the foundations of an ancient village, and it was soon ascertained that not one only, but seventy such villages, once existed in the various Swiss lakes, built upon piles in the middle of the water, and nearly all belonging to the stone period. Forty thousand piles have been calculated as belonging to one single village. Curiosity was highly excited, and every relic as it came to light was carefully studied and preserved. The pre-historic tale they tell is this:—The people who constructed these lake dwellings were decidedly further advanced in civilisation than the Danish aborigines. For we discover tokens of agriculture, three kinds of grain, four sorts of domesticated animals, fragments of pottery, even playthings for children. A canoe had foundered in the lake laden with stones; being intended, probably, when overtaken with misfortune, to strengthen the bases of the piles. The piles themselves could not have been driven in without the aid of ingenious mechanism. Stones of great weight must have been raised by strong cordage to do the work of the iron monkeys now employed in driving piles. So that we may be said to be contemplating a stage of advancement on a par with those extraordinary people who constructed the megalithic circles in England, of which the most celebrated is that on Salisbury Plain. What immense mechanical skill must have been exercised by a people who did not possess a single iron tool to drag stones of such enormous weight from incredible distances (for they are not the stones of the neighbourhood), and having set some of them upright to raise others equally ponderous to a great height to place them horizontally on the top. And then, again, there is the great serpent of Abury, which consists of massive stones arranged within sight of each other for miles upon miles in a serpentine line, in the middle of which is a small megalithic circle, the object of the long line of stones probably being to guide the people of a scattered race as they came periodically to attend their central place of worship. Traveling from east or west, they would find it much easier to strike the serpent somewhere than to hit the circle at once.

But to return to the lake-dwellers of Switzerland. Surprising as these monuments are of so remote an age, they are nevertheless the handiwork of a feeble race—of a race on the eve of extinction. The very circumstance of their having recourse to laboriously-constructed pile dwellings in the middle of the water, with a narrow access from the shore, seems to point to a sense of imbecility, and to the existence of a stronger race not far off of whom they were afraid. Nor were their fears vain, for a close inspection of the débris around these piles proves in the case of nearly every village that it has been destroyed by fire. Charred remains of rafters or other wood, and even of grains of corn, shed a melancholy light on this tragic story of a long-past age, when the bitter wail of wife and child must have risen up t Heaven as their burning homes sank in smoke and flame within the bosom of the once peaceful waters. There are two circumstances which make these lake dwellings particularly interesting—one is, that they present a point of osculation with written history; for Herodotus gives an account of a similar habitation in a small mountain lake in Thrace, five centuries before Christ, whose inhabitants were enabled to escape subjection to the Persian yoke during, the famous invasion of Greece, through their inaccessibility in the middle of the lake. And this very lake-village, by means of following out Herodotus's description, was re-discovered by a French savant, M. Deville, in 1862, i. e. seven years ago.

The second point of interest connected with the Swiss lake dwellings is that we page 13 have the means of approximating to the time in which they were first constructed; for the waters which flow into some of the lakes form deltas which gradually silt up at a definite rate per annum. Now, as we know how much has been silted up within historic periods, we have an element of calculation whereby to reach the building of the earliest dwelling. Three scientific gentlemen, taking quite different grounds, and making their calculations in perfect independence of each other, have come to very nearly the same conclusion—viz. that the bronze age must have begun about four or five thousand years ago, and the earliest stone age about a couple of thousand years before that. So that, if we just step back some sixty centuries of time we may see these ingenious savages actively at work with their ponderous stone monkeys driving their piles into the mud. And we must bear, too, in mind, that what we see being done in these few selected cases has been done at various times by similar peoples all over the world, sometimes attaining before their extinction a high degree of civilisation. In Central America the wandering traveller comes across the ruins of what must once have been extensive settlements of organised society, of which the present inhabitants can give no more account than we can of the people who constructed the megalithic circle at Stonehenge. And in the great basin of the Mississippi and of the Ohio there are hundreds of mounds which are the ruined temples of an extinct people; and so long ago is it since these tombs and temples have been buried in the earth, that large rivers have had time to change their courses, and whole generations of forests to succeed each other.

It is rather a curious circumstance that the Scriptures themselves, though they pass over the stone age historically, yet bear indirect testimony to its having once existed, by their mention of the use of stone implements in a religious ceremony. We know perfectly well how long religious usage will over live when other usages have become wholly changed by scientific discovery, or by political revolution. Indeed the very meaning of the word superstition is a surviving. When the Romans expelled their kings there was one religious ceremony which the king alone had been accustomed to perform; but rather than part with this ancient rite they appointed a special king to perform this special duty, and called him rex sacrificulus—a little sacrificing king. And exactly the same thing was done at Athens, one of the archons being created king for the self-same purpose. And so did the stone-knife survive in religious ceremonies long after it had been banished from the dinner-table and from the carpenter's shop. The Egyptians in Herodotus's time, when they embalmed a corpse, would open it only with a knife of stone. And so in Scripture we find that circumcision was originally so performed. Zipporah, the wife of Moses, discharged angrily this duty with a similar implement. And when Joshua, the son of Nun, died, at the age of 110, and they buried him on the north side of the hill of Gaash, the Septuagint copy goes on to say (though the verse is not in our present Hebrew text) that "there they laid with him in the tomb wherein they buried him there the stone knives wherewith he circumcised the children of Israel at the Gilgals, when he led them out of Egypt, as the Lord commanded. And there they are unto this day." But though this verse is not in the Hebrew text now, yet that it was in the Hebrew text from which the LXX. translated is made clear by the occurrence of a manifest Hebraism in their version. "In the tomb wherein they buried him there;" the word representing "wherein" in the Hebrew being a mere particle, and requiring the addition of "there" to indicate its antecedent.

Accustomed as we are to associate all branches of mechanical art and invention with the use of iron, we are prone to attach the idea of barbarism to an age when this metal was as yet undiscovered. But the idea is erroneous. A large amount of civilisation existed during the period of bronze, and before the introduction of steel. The admixture of the two metals copper and tin, which constitute bronze, furnished a very excellent and enduring material for every sort of work. If a tougher metal was required, more copper must be added; if a more brittle and harder one, then more tin. In the far famed siege of Troy, which is as it were the border ground between history and fable, the weapons fought with were of bronze, not steel, and we should gather that in the bronze the quantity of tin was high, for of one doughty champion engaged in single combat, and discharging his spear against the foe, we read that the spear-head on striking his adversary's shield was splintered into fragments, being page 14 over-tempered, it would appear, to give greater sharpness to the point. Compare with this the combat of David with the giant of Gath. Here too is bronze. Goliath has a helmet of brass (ought to have been translated bronze) upon his head. His coat of mail weighed 5,000 shekels of brass (1½cwt), and he had greaves of brass upon his legs, and a target of brass between his shoulders. All his defensive armour is of bronze. But, unlike that of the Trojan hero, his spear-head was of iron, so that we should argue that even in David's time steel was a costlier metal than bronze. And with Homer still more so, for in the Iliad he arrays his heroes in bronze, and in the Odyssey classifies the treasures of Ulysses in the keeping of Penelope as of bronze, and gold, and iron. It was this costliness of armour which gave such an enormous preponderance to the great heroes in ancient war. Not only were they picked men of superior strength, but, clad in their panoply of bronze, they were each a host in himself; so that Homer's description of their mowing down whole companies of men as a mower mows the grass is hardly a poetic exaggeration.

I may appear to be dwelling too long upon this metal, but in point of fact it was intimately concerned in altering the whole face of the world, and advancing man to a higher civilisation. Once discovered and its uses known, pre-historic men became as eager in pursuit of its constituent metals as a prospector after a gold-field now. It is wonderful what distances the great merchant nations of antiquity went to secure possession of them. There is no doubt that the Cornish mines, and those of the Scilly Islands (called in those days the islands of tin), were wrought by the enterprising Phoenicians. Indeed in one Cornish mine a stone axe was found, in a mine which had been worked out and abandoned before history began. Even prior to the time when the Tyrian ships brought these metals through the straits of Gibraltar, there is traditional evidence that they came overland through the Celtic nations. Hence Gaul was stimulated to commercial enterprise; and when Julius Cesar invaded the country he found their ships on the west coast so large, and standing so high out of the water, that the Roman javelin could with difficulty reach their deck. Those couldn't be mere coasting vessels; and though, to be sure, they burst upon our view in the midst of an historic period, yet the very circumstance of their doing so without any previous intimation of their existence is only the stronger proof of the great advances in civilisation many nations must have made without our hearing a word about it through any channel whatever. When Gaul comes into the field of view for the first time it is as a nation of considerable wealth, enterprising, inquisitive, fairly organised under kings, with travelling merchants everywhere, and transit duties systematically levied. And what is true of Gaul is in a tenfold degree true of many nations of the East. The old myth of the Argo is the tradition of an actual expedition which went in search of gold: the golden fleece is only the clumsy precursor of the digger's cradle. Herodotus mentions that a Phoenician ship doubled the Cape of Good Hope; and though he tells us he doesn't believe it, yet the consistent detail he gives leaves hardly any doubt about the fact. And if some peoples were famous on the sea, so were others on the land. The great pyramid of Egypt, built at least forty centuries ago, is prehistoric. And yet, so many curious properties has it, the results of precise calculation, that there is hardly any resisting the surmise of Sir John Hersehel, that it is really a marvellous monument of science—an attempt to perpetuate to posterity as in a book of stone the accurate result of astronomic observation. In the first place, the circuit of the base is 366 cubits—indicating, it would appear, the number of days in the annual revolution of the sun. To this very day we divide our circle into 360°, the most convenient proximate number to the days in the year; but this practice we did not obtain from Egypt, but from the more recent Babylonian college of Magi, at which college there is some reason to believe that the great prophet Daniel was professor of mathematics. But this perimeter of the great pyramid, though representing the yearly course of the sun, was for building purposes made square instead of circular, and so, of course, could not have a radius. What must they do for a radius? They raised it vertically, and made it the height of the pyramid. 366 divided by 211 gives the height of the building in cubits. Then, again, the orientation of the building is most exact, the sides standing within 5 of the several points of the compass. But by far the most interesting point is that the entrance passage, which looks due north, slopes upwards at just that angle which looks towards the pole—but not exactly, for you are aware that there is no star exactly at the north pole, but by the precession of the equinox sometimes one star and sometimes another in long cycles of years will be nearest that point. At present the Polar star is Arcturus, the tip of the Little Bear's tail. But some thousands of years ago the most conspicuous star nearest the Pole was Andraconis. Sir John Hersehel made an astronomical calculation to ascertain when it was that this star would be seen through this entrance gallery. It was just about 4,000 years ago, and in one particular year in the same century it has been found that while Andraconis was crossing the field of view, the page 15 Pleiades was crossing the same meridian, right over head. I need not remind you what an important constellation the Pleiades was in ancient astronomy. The first astronomical question which the Lord, speaking to Job out of the whirlwind, puts to him is. "Canst thou bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?

This first great pyramid was the tribute of adoring wonder to the glories of astronomical science, and we can well imagine the deep enthusiasm its first fresh study would inspire. We need not entertain any misgivings on the score of the motive being too feeble to produce so massive a result. The conclusion we arrive at is further corroborated by the fact that the great pyramid contains no inscriptions; whereas the other pyramids, which appear to be clumsy copies of this, and having a very imperfect orientation, are full of mural paintings and hieroglyphics of historic import. They were historic monuments; this, a mathematical one. The builders of it doubtless fancied that they were fixing a date from which all chronological calculations might be made thenceforward with unerring precision. We can imagine the great disappointment they would feel on finding that Andraconis, their polar star, soon began to wander away from his position, and that that which with so much trouble they had fixed as a guide to all future chronology should prove false to their anticipations. This maybe Daniel's meaning when he says of the Almighty, "He changeth the times and the seasons." What, however, disappointed them enables us to calculate backwards the time when they lived; and it is a curious circumstance that a great hieroglyphic scholar (William Osburn). by quite independent investigation, places the Egyptian dynasty, to which we owe the great pyramid in the same century, 2200 to 2100 B.C.

But it is time for me to be drawing to a close I have selected, as you will observe, some of the salient points of man's unwritten history which have escaped the deluge of oblivion. They betoken a gradual advance from uncultivated barbarism to a high development. It would have been impossible within the compass of a single lecture to go into greater detail. Taking a general view of the whole subject, I see no reason, physical, moral, or linguistic, to doubt that the earliest created human beings sprang from a single pair. My conviction is that the earliest of mankind were rude in the extreme, and that they continued a very long time in that condition—that, in fact, the earliest command given to man. "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish [or rather fill] the earth," was literally fulfilled before either Cain or Seth was thought of—that during that long period man might he comparatively innocent, having no sense of sin, but his intellect was not stimulated to any great activity, and this from the very nature of the case. He lived in a genial climate; his wants were few; laud to hunt over was plenty. If by natural increase particular localities grew over peopled, all the world was, so to speak, before him, and the teeming prairies of the earth were over inviting him to "seek fresh woods and pastures new." And thus the first wave of population which encompassed the world bore a striking uniformity of likeness in habits and manners to our primitive type. But when the second or third wave of population supervened, man had to enter upon quite a new career. Ho bad to make good his position wherever he came against a race which had already preoccupied the ground. And now arose the necessity for some sort of social organisation; now was there scope for superiority of intellect to show itself. The art of war sprang up; men built walled towns and acquired property in sheep and oxen; the best grazing grounds acquired a value, which if the occupiers would keep to themselves they must do so by strenuous exertion and by force of arms, by submission to discipline, by circumspection and forethought. Under such influences, both intellect and strength of character would grow apace. Power once organised has a tendency to augment itself. Some mightier mind is sure in time to arise, and give such an impetus to the onward movement that a single lifetime witnesses a wondrous change. Weaker tribes, overpowered by the stronger, must submit to do their servile work. The innate passion for sovereignty and sway becomes developed to an extraordinary degree; and the world, at last, gazes with astonishment on such marvellous empires as disturbed the mind of Nebuchadnezzar in the visions of the night. And, strange to say, even these empires reached the zenith of their power prior to the commencement of what we now call history.

If now for one moment we turn back to the book of Genesis, we shall find these views confirmed. Except in that single tradition in which Noah's genealogy is traced, the word "Adam" is not a proper name, but a common noun, and takes the definite article, like another noun, "the man." Cain is the first man who is made to assume any individuality. He builded a city. He is the typo and representative of those who first cultivated the ground, and who by natural consequence we're thus first able to concentrate population in a town. This is consistent. Again, concentration stimulates intellect. Mind dashes with mind; and a city's artificial wants bring ingenuity into play. And therefore it is that among Cain's immediate descendants Tubal Cain is found as an instructor of every artificer in brass and iron. But not only to mechanical arts does a city life give birth, but also to the refinements of poetry and music. Lamech, the fifth in descent from Cain, furnishes us with a specimen of the earliest poetry extant; and his son Jubal was the father of all who handle the harp and the organ. The letter of Scripture could not well hand down to us the tunes which .Tubal played, still less the sound of his instruments; but Lamech's poetry has survived. It is of the same order as are most of the Psalms, or as those utterances page 16 of the great Balaam when ho takes up his parable and speaks. It consists of language so balanced that the second half of a verse is the repetition of the first, with the wording changed. Lamech had, it would appear, accidentally killed a man, and it is thus that his conscience disburdened itself of its weight to his two wives :—

Adah and Zillah, hear my voice,
Ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech.
For I have slain a man to my wounding,
And a young man to my hurt.
If Cain shall be avenged sevenfold,
Truly Lamech seventy and seven fold.

And here the record suddenly stops. I will take advantage of the circumstance, and stop as suddenly. These old writings are the most wonderful in the world. Simple in their style, and of unknown authorship, they come before us without any pretensions. They don't claim, like Mohammed's Koran, to have been brought to earth by an archangel's hand. They are merely ancient records; and no inspired writer has ever said they were anything more. But they are genuine records, and replete with religious truth. It is our deep reverence for the religious truths they contain, and the greater truths they foreshadow, which may sometimes have led us to regard them with a prostration of mind amounting almost to superstition. But this is no more than befalls any other thing which is associated with religion. Our Great Teacher rebuked his countrymen for a too superstitious reverence for the Sabbath. And the same fault attaches to all who overvalue the husk of religion in their great reverence for religion itself; whether that husk be a sacred day, or a consecrated place, or a religious site, or the dominical table, or a canonised saint. It is the same reverent feeling which, in fervent excess, has led to Mariolatry, to Sabbatolatry, to Bibliolatry. Let us ever bear in mind that the letter killeth, but the spirit it is which giveth life.

The Rev. I. Moore, S.J., in moving a vote of thanks to the lecturer, bore testimony to the lucidity, comprehensiveness, and ability with which lie had treated the subject; and whilst he could not receive all the interpretations and deductions from the scriptures which the lecturer had drawn, he could yet admire and appreciate the erudition which had been displayed.

Dr. Barker seconded the motion, which was carried with acclamation.

The Rev. Dr. Bromby briefly returned thanks, and expressed his entire approval of the objects the Early-closing Association sought to attain, and his wish that they might succeed.

The Rev. J. S. Waugh proposed a vote of thanks to the Right Rev. the Bishop of Melbourne for presiding.

Mr. G. Foord seconded the motion, which was carried by acclamation.

The Right Rev. the Bishop of Melbourne, in returning thanks, expressed his pleasure at seeing the good account to which the association was trying to turn its influence, and the advantages it had gained by attending to the intellectual improvement of the people. So far as he was able, he should be always happy to promote their objects. He had derived much pleasure from the able and interesting lecture given by the Rev. Dr. Bromby, and while he did not agree with all the inferences he had drawn from his scientific research, he (the bishop) felt that religion had nothing to fear from science. No man who believed in the Bible should endeavour to restrain the progress of scientific men, as there was nothing to fear from their discoveries.

The Doxology was then sung, and after the Bishop had pronounced the Benediction, the meeting dispersed.