THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

Literature and National Policy.

VOL. V.—APRIL, 1864.—No. IV.

CONTENTS

SIR CHARLES LYELL ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.[1]

When Thomas Chalmers, sixty years ago, lecturing at St. Andrews, ventured to announce his conviction that 'the writings of Moses do not fix the antiquity of the globe,' he startled and alarmed, to no small degree, the orthodoxy of the day. It was a statement far in advance of the religious thinking of the time. That massive breadth and comprehensiveness of intellect which soon placed him, facile princeps, at the head of the clergy of Scotland, joined with a candor, and ingenuous honesty, which made him admired and beloved by all, could not fail to perceive, and would not hesitate to acknowledge, the force of the evidence then for some time slowly but steadily and surely accumulating from the investigations and discoveries of geological science, which has forced back the origin of the earth to a vast and undated antiquity. But nothing could have been farther from the imagination of the great majority