(6) Much importance has been attached to the early works and high culture of Egypt and Chaldæa, as evidence of vast time during which arts were growing from a supposed rude stone age. But it must be observed that no such period is known to antedate civilisation in the East, and that if the early empires were established by survivors of the Deluge, they must have brought with them the culture of Antediluvian times. Farther, the notion of men emerging from a half-brutal state, and from the use of the rudest implements, is purely conjectural and not supported by facts. In America, where the semi-civilised agricultural races are unquestionably the oldest, the rudest possible implements were used by these partially civilised agricultural people along with polished stone and metal; and Schliemann has shown that a rude stone age succeeded the civilisation of Troy, and this at a time when Phœnicia and Egypt were at the height of their civilisation. Such facts, which might fill volumes, show how little value is to be attached to supposed ages of rough and polished stone. (7) The difficulties attending the establishment of geological dates for deposits like those containing the remains of men are very great. They are altogether superficial and local, not wide-spread marine beds in which a distinct order of superposition can be clearly traced. They are not easily separated from the glacial beds below, or from those above which have been modified by human agency, by land-floods, or by landslips. Thus the application of geological criteria of age to them is very difficult and uncertain. Evidence of this could easily be given, in the many errors which have been promulgated, and which have had to be retracted by their authors, or have been disproved by the observations of others. For example, no country was at one time richer in supposed evidences of the antiquity of man than Scandinavia; but Professor Torell, the director of the Geological Survey of Sweden, has recently made a careful re-examination of the facts, and has found that there is no evidence whatever of the existence of man in Scandinavia before the Neolithic or polished stone age. There are, however, evidences of considerable changes of level since that time, and it would seem even since the twelfth century of our era. The remarkable and seemingly inexcusable errors of observation referred to in Professor Torell’s memoir, should enforce a caution on geologists as to the uncertainties of such evidence. Lyell sifted the testimony bearing on this subject with great care in the first edition of his _Antiquity of Man_. In later editions he had to make large abatements, and now much of the evidence in the latest edition would have to be withdrawn or otherwise applied.