To a geologist the temples of
Karnak and the New Law Courts would be absolutely contemporaneous; he
has no means by which he could discriminate in date between a scarabaeus
of Thothmes, a denarius of Antonine, and a bronze farthing of her Most
Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria. Competent authorities have shown good
grounds for believing that the Glacial Epoch ended about 80,000 years
ago; and everything that has happened since the Glacial Epoch is, from
the geological point of view, described as 'recent.' A shell embedded in
a clay cliff sixty or seventy thousand years ago, while short and
swarthy Mongoloids still dwelt undisturbed in Britain, ages before the
irruption of the 'Ancient Britons' of our inadequate school-books, is,
in the eyes of geologists generally, still regarded as purely modern.
But behind that indivisible moment of recent time, that eighty thousand
years which coincides in part with the fraction of a single swing of the
cosmical pendulum, there lie hours, and days, and weeks, and months, and
years, and centuries, and ages of an infinite, an illimitable, an
inconceivable past, whose vast divisions unfold themselves slowly, one
beyond the other, to our aching vision in the half-deciphered pages of
the geological record. Before the Glacial Epoch there comes the
Pliocene, immeasurably longer than the whole expanse of recent time; and
before that again the still longer Miocene, and then the Eocene,
immeasurably longer than all the others put together.
Pages:
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310