Now, what says science and history of prehistoric man? The earliest traces of which we have authentic record prove that men lived in caves, not cities like that of Enoch; they lived by hunting and fishing, not by agriculture and breeding sheep, like Cain and Abel; far less by vine-dressing, like Noah. They had small hands, for the implements found give room for only three fingers of an ordinary man; their skulls were long, and their legs more nearly allied to the monkey type. There is no trace in the palæolithic period of any such human beings as Moses describes; none even in the next period, styled by Sir John Lubbock the later or “polished stone age,” like Tubal-Cain, a “worker in brass and iron,” none like Jubal, who could “handle the harp and organ.” Long, long before the “age of bronze” dawned upon the earth, ages upon ages of a ruder and still ruder race lived and passed away; a race whose instruments were stone, first rough and subsequently smooth and polished. It is impossible in the present state of human knowledge to determine what length of time elapsed before the palæolithic age glided into the neolithic, but it must have been very great, and even then the rude life which presents its records to observation shows that man was far removed from the Mosaic description of the immediate children of Cain and grandsons of Noah. There were no builders of cities, no founders of empires; but as we ascend higher and higher from the drift, we trace a certain knowledge in pottery and a goodly skill in working up stone into warlike and other implements. The gallery graves of the earth, even in the latest age of the neolithic period, resemble Eskimo huts more than regular cities and palaces, and it is not till we arrive at the evening of this long day that we discover any trace of herdsmen and tillers of the soil. All this vast history of man finds no place in the Book of Genesis. As the writer of that book knew nothing of the rocks and their mighty revelations, he knew nothing of man but in the state of civilised society. The one and the other are wholly irreconcilable with the logic of facts, and deserve no higher place than the wild legends of India and China, Greece, Rome, and our own Britain. What would Sir John Lubbock say to the legend: that Noah the first man, so to speak, was a vinedresser; that within a century his offspring were building a tower, the top of which was to reach the skies, a tower described as a most finished and extraordinary work of art? What would he say to the statement that primitive man, long before the neolithic or even palæolithic period produced the founders of such grand empires as Babylon, Assyria, Persia, and old Greece? It is an insult to our understanding, a contradiction to our eyes, a gainsaying of the infallible records of the rocks, to place credence in such legends. They are palpably untrue, wholly impossible, and as wholly irreconcilable with history and the experience of facts. {23}