Not since Charles Darwin published his "Origin of Species" in°1858 has there been so much interest taken in the age of the earth and the origin of man there is at the present time. We have lately had Dr. G. B. Cressey lecturing in our midst arguing from the rate at which the Yangtze deposits its "sediment that the present structure of this part of China has been of, practically, unchanged formation for 90,000' years and, "probably, pendd of several hundred thousand years." The total age of the planet he estimates at 1,500 million years of geologic time. That is, time during which the earth's strata was in course of formation, How long, previous to this, the earth was in an incandescent state is undetermined. These figures are so stupendous that they convey little to our—finite mind We cannot visualize or imagine a period running into hundreds of millions of years but we are beyond measure amazed at the thought of the incalculable energy that has operated through these uncounted aeons, unhasting and unresting, with neither diminution nor' irreyularity in its working. Multiply this by the infinite nuriber of suns and systems in stellar space and-the product is nothing less than eternity.
Coincident with investigations into the age of, the earth is research into the antiquity of man's appearance thereon, Roy Chapman Andrews and a party of scientists have started out on an expedition into the Gobi Desert where they hope to find traces of our first ancestor. Last summer, we are told, a tenth, believed to belong to prehistoric man, was found in the western hills, about twelve miles from Peking, and these scientific sleuths are out to find the owner.
Here is a theme for Conan Doyle. The clue is one of the finest ever submitted to Sherlock Holmes and Watson himself could hardly *fail to see the possibility and the glory of finding the man who is minus this remarkable molar, "The search pithecanthropus, who, according to accepted theory, was the progenitor of the human race. Archeology knows nothing of an ape man. The skeletons of the most remote period found by the excavators were those of men with brain capacity equal to our own, Their handiwork does not suffer by comparison with that of skilled craftsmen of our own time, To be sure this does not prove a great deal for an eminent scientist has said that, if there were a man's soul' behind the oram of an ape, he had no doubt that it would function intelligently. This is a somewhat cryptic utterance for science knows nothing of the entity called a soul and makes no attempt to define it. The hard fact remains that man's brain power, his capacity for acquiring knowledge and ability to put that knowledge to useful ends, has not increased by one iota within the limits of historic time—even carrying those limits back for a period of more than 6,000 years, Kings in those early days ys buried with a reud slave attend-be taken as an evidence of barbarism but we know that the practice was carried down to; comparatively, recent and cultured times. It was once universal in China and continued long after the philosophical works of the sages were revered by scholars. The wives and concubines of Ts'in Shih-huang ti (B.C. 210) were buried with him and the workmen who had constructed the tomb were walled up with the dead monarch. The paper figures carried in funeral proce reminiscent of the the late Tsing dynasty erected many memorial arches to widows who immolated themselves on the death of their husbands.
There is a very thin veneer between barbarism and civilization as was proved in the great war and as communist atrocities abundantly demonstrate to us in our day. We rather think that when the Mongolian expedition finds the prehistoric man he will prove to be a very human individual, accustomed to sit outside his' cave door and grumble that children are not brought up now as they used to be in his young day' is circumscribed for the locality is already indicated. Somewhere in the Gobi Desert there is the skeleton of a man with a certain tooth missing and, however cleverly the cave man dent may have supplied the deficiency, we need not doubt that when the missing cadaver is unearthed the errant tooth will establish his identity and mankind will know whether it is of respectable parentage or not.
Archieologists have been attacking the problem from another angle. Excavations are being made, as everyone knows, Egypt, in Mesopotamia and many other parts of the world with truly astonishing results. In Ur of the Chaldees a king's tomb has been uncovered at depth of 40 feet below the present surface level. This is connected with the temple to the Moon god (more probably goddess for the moon is feminine in every mythology) which was built by Ur-engur who was the founder of the third dynasty and lived about 4,000 B.C. "This pushes the antiquity of man as far back as do the relies found
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.