Address / by Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., &c.

  • Lyell, Charles, Sir, 1797-1875.
Date:
[between 1800 and 1899]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address / by Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., LL.D., D.C.L., F.R.S., &c. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    2] Africa. As to the first of these—the mammoth—I am aware that some writers contend that it could not have died out many tens of thousands of years before our time, because its flesh has been found preserved in ice, in Siberia, in so fresh a state as to serve as food for dogs, bears, and wolves; but this argument seems to me fallacious. Middendorf, in 164‘3, after digging through some thickness of frozen soil in Siberia, came down upon an icy mass, in which the carcase of a mammoth was imbedded, so perfect that, among other parts, the pupil of its eye was taken out, and is now preserved in the Museum of Moscow. No one will deny that this elephant had lain for several thousand years in its icy envelope ; and if it had been left undisturbed, and the cold had gone on increasing, for myriads of centuries, wre might reasonably expect that the frozen flesh might continue undecayed until a second glacial period had passed away. When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the glacial and postglacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in prehistoric times, by investing the causes which have modified the animate and inanimate world with extraordinary and excessive energy. It is related of a great Irish orator of our day, that when he was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously towards a public charity, he was persuaded by a friend to make a more liberal donation. In doing so lie apologized for his first apparent want of generosity, by saying that his early life had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and that “ they who are born to affluence cannot easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty out of one’s bones.” In like manner, we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what seems so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronology of the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is convinced, and we are per¬ suaded that we ought to make more liberal grants of time to the geologist, wo feel how hard it is to get the chill of poverty out of our bones. I will now briefly allude, in conclusion, to two points on which a gradual