ons of warriors
with gold collars, bronze battle-axes, and flint arrow heads are quite
common in the Irish bogs. The absence of iron, on which so great a
theory of the stone, bronze, and iron ages as successive developments of
civilization has been raised, is easily accounted for by the perishable
nature of iron when exposed to moisture. But that this Celtic race used
iron also, as well as bronze and stone, is proved incontestably by the
discovery, in 1863, of the slag of their iron furnaces, among a number
of flint weapons, and Celtic skulls, at Linhope, in Northumberland; the
iron itself having perished by rust.[367] The pottery, glass, and
handmills found beside these skulls show that their owners were by no
means the degraded savages supposed to represent the so-called stone
age.

Horner's Nile pottery, discovered at a depth of sixty feet, and
calculated to be twelve thousand years old, and fragments found still
deeper in this deposit, and calculated at thirty thousand years, were
found to be underlaid by still deeper layers, producing Roman pottery;
and in the deepest boring of all, at the foot of the statue of Rameses
II., the discovery of the Grecian honeysuckle, marked on some of these
mysterious fragments, which they had claimed as pre-historic, proved
that it could not be older than the Greek conquest of Egypt. Sir Robert
Stephenson found in the neighborhood of Damietta, at a greater depth
than Mr. Horner reached, a brick bearing the stamp of Mohammed Ali.[368]
The shifting currents of all rivers flowing through alluvial deposits
bury such things in a single season of high water.

The raised beaches of Scotland are quite conspicuous geological features
of the Highlands, and have furnished themes for calculations of their
vast antiquity. Here and there human remains had been discovered in
them, but no link could be had to connect them otherwise than
geologically with history. Geologists, accordingly, with their visual
generosity of time, assigned them to the pre-Adamite period. But
recently the missing link has been found, and these progenitors of Tubal
Cain, and the pre-Adamites generally, are found to have been in the
habit of supping their broth out of Roman pottery!

Lyell, the acknowledged prince of geologists, is famous for his
chronological blundering; of which his calculations of the age of the
delta of the Mississippi is a very good American example. He calculates
the quantity of mud in suspension i