whom God created; nor that he and
his posterity were the only intelligent beings occupying this world
before our tenancy of it; nor that we are even now the exclusive
occupants. On the contrary, it makes very distinct allusions to other
races, capable of assuming serpentine, swinish, and human bodies, and of
meddling disastrously in earthly affairs in former times; though, as it
does not profess to teach us truths which do not concern us, it gives us
no narration of the creation or history of pre-Adamite animals or men.
But there is no more ground of objection against the Bible for
neglecting to give us a history of pre-Adamite men, if there were such
men, than for neglecting to describe the pre-Adamite animals, or the
coal measures, or the nebulae, or the climate, soil, population, and
politics of Jupiter. The Bible has one great object--to teach men how to
be holy and happy; and it can not be shown that the chronicles of the
pre-Adamites, if they kept chronicles of their alleged savage state,
would help us in the acquisition of holiness.

No discoveries, then, which geologists may make of pre-Adamite races of
men, can at all affect the credit of Moses' account of the creation of
Adam, and of the history of his family. They may fill museums, if they
please, with their flint arrow-heads and axes, they may pile up pyramids
of stone mortars, they may perhaps some day discover an old-world bronze
railroad, and bronze-clad or copper-bottomed steamboats, they may
produce pre-Adamic electric, aeronautic engines, and magnetic sewing
machines, or bone needles, we care not which; and we will admire them,
and confess that they are very curious, and perhaps very old; but
unless they can show that Adam was descended from these old-world
folks, we have no biblical quarrel with them. Like Moses, we will let
them rest in peace.

But we would remark, thirdly, that no such discoveries have yet been
made. No human bone, implement, or monument, has yet been discovered
which can be proved to be more ancient than Adam, or nearly so ancient.
There is not a single indisputable fact to show, that any of the tools,
bones, or monuments; alleged in this discussion, is of any specific date
whatever, save that the Danish bogs came down to the date of the Danish
invasion of Ireland in the eleventh century; the burnt corn of the Swiss
lake dwellings was probably that which Julius Caesar describes the
Helvetians as burning preparatory to their invasi