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Show 498 TilE MONOGENISTS AND by the most rigorous opponents of man's antiquity-Elie do Beaumont, Buckland, Brogniart, Lyell, Owen, and other illustrious palmontologists- arc accepted. Since Roman days, bos long f/'l'(m.~ no longer roams tho British isles; oven if bos aurochs may yet have escaped tho yager's bullet in Lithuanian thickets. Man and tho moa (dinornis giganteus) wore formerly at war in Now Zealand: the dodo vanished, during tho 16th century, from Tristan d'Acunba; leaving but a skull and a foot (if memory serves) to authenticate its portrait in tho Ashmol an Museum nt Oxford. So too has tl dronte expired at the Mauritius. Of tho cpinornis we know not whether living natives of Madagascar-that unaccountable island to which, Commersan (Bougainvillc's naturalist) happily says, "N aturo seems to have withdrawn, as to a sanctuary, therein to work upon other models than those which she had mastered olsowhoro "-still feast on its colossal eggs. And, taking again our oldest historical country, and tho one with which I happen to be somewhat acquainted, where, in Egypt, is now the ibis religiosa,202 of yore as common as Guinea-hens with us? Who but an unconquerable botanist, amid tho fens of Menzalch, could point out the cyperus papyrus; or any where along tho Lower Nile discover an indigenous faba J'Egyptiaca ? Yet tho former was once the main instrument of Pharaonic civilization; being with tho latter, the "primitive nutriment of man " and symboliz.ing '~tho first origin of things."293 Six hundred yoa~s have passed s1ncc Abd-el-Lateef deplored tho extinction of the little clump o~ sacred pe1·seaslanguishing then at hoobra-shabich. Where, before h1s day, there had been thousands, now curiosity douLts over but one sample-in my time, withering in the garden of the Greek patriarch at Cair?. Emblc~ of Thoth, minister of Osiris, guardian of the plum.mc~ 111 tho myst10al scales of Amenthi, the cynocephalus hamadryas, 1f st1ll an unruly denizen of Abyssinia, Arabia, and Persia, no more steals in Egypt the sycamore fig: 294 Mppopotami have :fled up to Dongola; and wary m·ocodiles are not shot at lower down than ~be tomb of Moorad-bcy, last of the bravo, at Girg6. Like the wolf 111 England, or his dog in Erin, one genus is extinct· tho other all but so: or else, as within the territories of our vast Re~ublic-comparcd to which 295 "tho domains of the llouso of llapsburg arc but a patch on tho earth's surface" -tho native rattlesnake ftcos before tho imported hog, tho bison disappears before the face of starving Indians; 292 Dur~ng 15 years of a sportsman's lifo in Egypt, 1 novor snw one alive. My old friend Mr.' IIo.rrl~ ho.s lo.tterly been more fortunate. Cf. Proceeding• of the Acad. 0~ Nat Science~ PhlltLdelphu~. 1860. :t • ' : JrgRODOTUS, ii. 92 :-~Ionus APouo, i. 80 :-GLIDDON, Otia AJ:r;yptiaca, p. 69. ltOSELLINI, .Monummtl, for tho plates. 296 WEDSTER to liULZEMAN, 1861. TilE POLYGENIS'rS. 499 and these last relics of auccurnl>ing savagism are melting away before whiskey, Bowie-knives, and Colt-revolvers; so parallcly, ~n many branches-botanical, zoological, and human-of Natural Illstory, the AuTuon of Nature, within historical rcco1Jc.ction, has :ver vindicated her eternal and relentless law of "formation, generatiOn, dissolution." 296 '!'he tableau of osseous and industrial vestiges of bimanes met with over the world, supplied by Marcel de Sorros,279 brings down fossil discovery to some twenty years ago. Much of what has been dono since, particularly in America, is summed u~ by onr c~l la~or£~tor U sbcr. My comments, therefore, may be restncted, after mdwatmg fresher materials to these and some few amongst the elder facts. Nomenclature, a~ above shown, being passably vague, it may be well to come to an understanding with tho reader upon the senses of some words in our terminology; taking M. de Serres for our guide.298 "'rhoso (geological) formations having, then, boo~ wrought by phenomena of an order totally different from the tertiary,. one m~st necessarily designate, under a particular name, thos~ orgamc rcmam.s found in them. At first, it had been proposed to g1ve to these debn8 the name of sub-fossils, so as thereby to indicate their newness, rclati vely to the t1·ue fossils. Preferable it has, notwithstanding, sccmo? to us, to designate them under the term of humatil.es; 299 a dcno~unation derived from the Latin word humatus, of wlnch the moanmg is nearly the same as that of fossilis; vvith this differ~nce, that the former expresses the idea of a body buried in an ac01dental rather than in a natural manner." It must bo allowed that the last sentence somewhat establishes "a distinction without a cliflercncc ;" but I presume M. Scrr s to 200 It PAYNI!l KNronT [11qui·ry into the Symbolic Language of Ancient Art and Mytl1olor;y, Londo~, 8vo, 1818; pp'. 26, 107, 112, 180-1, HlO, &c. :-but cspocio.l~y in his Account of t~e Remai118 of the Worship of Priapus, lately existing at lscrmia, Naples; m "two Letters to S1r Jos. Dankea nnd Sir Wm. Hamilton, London, 4to., 1786; pp. 107-22. 2111 Essai wr les Cavernes (suprn, note 1 a2), pp. 194-7. . . . 298 Op. cit., p. 216: _sec tables illustro.tivo of tho ohomioal compos1hon of lwmallle and of fossil bones, p. 98. . . . 4 1868. m Oo LVUJ Imperial Dictionary, English, /ccllllolor;tcal and 8CI671tific, Glasgow, to, , I., PP· 9 1 44-6': _ (liumus, soil) "Jiu~rus, n torm synonymous w~th mould"- "IIu~!AT~: .a compound formed by the union of liumuv with a snlifinblo bas1s. Tbo humus, of so1ls IS oonsidorod to unite chiefly with ammonia, forming n httmate of that ~ubstanco. -p. 790, (Fossil, fossili•, fromfodio, fouus, to dig,) "more commonly the potnfieu f~,rms of plnuts and animals, which occur in tho strata that compose tho surfnoe of our .gl~~o -II., P· _286, "Orgnnic remains." 1 have not met, howovor, with tho form" humat1le m works wntt4ln in our lnnguage. |