CHAPTER XXXVIII.

THE PROFESSOR IN HIS CHAIR AGAIN

To understand this apostrophe of my uncle's, made to absent French

savants, it will be necessary to allude to an event of high

importance in a palæontological point of view, which had occurred a

little while before our departure.

On the 28th of March, 1863, some excavators working under the

direction of M. Boucher de Perthes, in the stone quarries of Moulin

Quignon, near Abbeville, in the department of Somme, found a human

jawbone fourteen feet beneath the surface. It was the first fossil of

this nature that had ever been brought to light. Not far distant were

found stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads stained and encased by

lapse of time with a uniform coat of rust.

The noise of this discovery was very great, not in France alone, but in

England and in Germany. Several savants of the French Institute, and

amongst them MM. Milne-Edwards and de Quatrefages, saw at once the

importance of this discovery, proved to demonstration the genuineness of

the bone in question, and became the most ardent defendants in what the

English called this 'trial of a jawbone.' To the geologists of the

United Kingdom, who believed in the certainty of the fact--Messrs.

Falconer, Busk, Carpenter, and others--scientific Germans were soon

joined, and amongst them the forwardest, the most fiery, and the most

enthusiastic, was my uncle Liedenbrock.

Therefore the genuineness of a fossil human relic of the quaternary

period seemed to be incontestably proved and admitted.

It is true that this theory met with a most obstinate opponent in M.

Elie de Beaumont. This high authority maintained that the soil of

Moulin Quignon was not diluvial at all, but was of much more recent

formation; and, agreeing in that with Cuvier, he refused to admit

that the human species could be contemporary with the animals of the

quaternary period. My uncle Liedenbrock, along with the great body of

the geologists, had maintained his ground, disputed, and argued,

until M. Elie de Beaumont stood almost alone in his opinion.

We knew all these details, but we were not aware that since our

departure the question had advanced to farther stages. Other similar

maxillaries, though belonging to individuals of various types and

different nations, were found in the loose grey soil of certain

grottoes in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, as well as weapons,

tools, earthen utensils, bones of children and adults. The existence

therefore of man in the quaternary period seemed to become daily more

certain.

Nor was this all. Fresh discoveries of remains in the pleiocene

formation had emboldened other geologists to refer back the human

species to a higher antiquity still. It is true that these remains

were not human bones, but objects bearing the traces of his

handiwork, such as fossil leg-bones of animals, sculptured and carved

evidently by the hand of man.

Thus, at one bound, the record of the existence of man receded far

back into the history of the ages past; he was a predecessor of the

mastodon; he was a contemporary of the southern elephant; he lived a

hundred thousand years ago, when, according to geologists, the

pleiocene formation was in progress.

Such then was the state of palæontological science, and what we knew

of it was sufficient to explain our behaviour in the presence of this

stupendous Golgotha. Any one may now understand the frenzied

excitement of my uncle, when, twenty yards farther on, he found

himself face to face with a primitive man!

It was a perfectly recognisable human body. Had some particular soil,

like that of the cemetery St. Michel, at Bordeaux, preserved it thus

for so many ages? It might be so. But this dried corpse, with its

parchment-like skin drawn tightly over the bony frame, the limbs

still preserving their shape, sound teeth, abundant hair, and finger

and toe nails of frightful length, this desiccated mummy startled us

by appearing just as it had lived countless ages ago. I stood mute

before this apparition of remote antiquity. My uncle, usually so

garrulous, was struck dumb likewise. We raised the body. We stood it

up against a rock. It seemed to stare at us out of its empty orbits.

We sounded with our knuckles his hollow frame.

After some moments' silence the Professor was himself again. Otto

Liedenbrock, yielding to his nature, forgot all the circumstances of

our eventful journey, forgot where we were standing, forgot the

vaulted cavern which contained us. No doubt he was in mind back again

in his Johannæum, holding forth to his pupils, for he assumed his

learned air; and addressing himself to an imaginary audience, he

proceeded thus:

"Gentlemen, I have the honour to introduce to you a man of the

quaternary or post-tertiary system. Eminent geologists have denied

his existence, others no less eminent have affirmed it. The St.

Thomases of palæontology, if they were here, might now touch him with

their fingers, and would be obliged to acknowledge their error. I am

quite aware that science has to be on its guard with discoveries of

this kind. I know what capital enterprising individuals like Barnum

have made out of fossil men. I have heard the tale of the kneepan of

Ajax, the pretended body of Orestes claimed to have been found by the

Spartans, and of the body of Asterius, ten cubits long, of which

Pausanias speaks. I have read the reports of the skeleton of Trapani,

found in the fourteenth century, and which was at the time identified

as that of Polyphemus; and the history of the giant unearthed in the

sixteenth century near Palermo. You know as well as I do, gentlemen,

the analysis made at Lucerne in 1577 of those huge bones which the

celebrated Dr. Felix Plater affirmed to be those of a giant nineteen

feet high. I have gone through the treatises of Cassanion, and all

those memoirs, pamphlets, answers, and rejoinders published

respecting the skeleton of Teutobochus, the invader of Gaul, dug out

of a sandpit in the Dauphiné, in 1613. In the eighteenth century I

would have stood up for Scheuchzer's pre-adamite man against Peter

Campet. I have perused a writing, entitled Gigan--"

Here my uncle's unfortunate infirmity met him--that of being unable

in public to pronounce hard words.

"The pamphlet entitled Gigan--"

He could get no further.

"Giganteo--"

It was not to be done. The unlucky word would not come out. At the

Johannæum there would have been a laugh.

"Gigantosteologie," at last the Professor burst out, between two

words which I shall not record here.

Then rushing on with renewed vigour, and with great animation:

"Yes, gentlemen, I know all these things, and more. I know that

Cuvier and Blumenbach have recognised in these bones nothing more

remarkable than the bones of the mammoth and other mammals of the

post-tertiary period. But in the presence of this specimen to doubt

would be to insult science. There stands the body! You may see it,

touch it. It is not a mere skeleton; it is an entire body, preserved

for a purely anthropological end and purpose."

I was good enough not to contradict this startling assertion.

"If I could only wash it in a solution of sulphuric acid," pursued my

uncle, "I should be able to clear it from all the earthy particles

and the shells which are incrusted about it. But I do not possess

that valuable solvent. Yet, such as it is, the body shall tell us its

own wonderful story."

Here the Professor laid hold of the fossil skeleton, and handled it

with the skill of a dexterous showman.

"You see," he said, "that it is not six feet long, and that we are

still separated by a long interval from the pretended race of giants.

As for the family to which it belongs, it is evidently Caucasian. It

is the white race, our own. The skull of this fossil is a regular

oval, or rather ovoid. It exhibits no prominent cheekbones, no

projecting jaws. It presents no appearance of that prognathism which

diminishes the facial angle. [1] Measure that angle. It is nearly

ninety degrees. But I will go further in my deductions, and I will

affirm that this specimen of the human family is of the Japhetic

race, which has since spread from the Indies to the Atlantic. Don't

smile, gentlemen."

Nobody was smiling; but the learned Professor was frequently

disturbed by the broad smiles provoked by his learned eccentricities.

"Yes," he pursued with animation, "this is a fossil man, the

contemporary of the mastodons whose remains fill this amphitheatre.

But if you ask me how he came there, how those strata on which he lay

slipped down into this enormous hollow in the globe, I confess I

cannot answer that question. No doubt in the post-tertiary period

considerable commotions were still disturbing the crust of the earth.

The long-continued cooling of the globe produced chasms, fissures,

clefts, and faults, into which, very probably, portions of the upper

earth may have fallen. I make no rash assertions; but there is the

man surrounded by his own works, by hatchets, by flint arrow-heads,

which are the characteristics of the stone age. And unless he came

here, like myself, as a tourist on a visit and as a pioneer of

science, I can entertain no doubt of the authenticity of his remote

origin."

[1] The facial angle is formed by two lines, one touching the brow

and the front teeth, the other from the orifice of the ear to the

lower line of the nostrils. The greater this angle, the higher

intelligence denoted by the formation of the skull. Prognathism is

that projection of the jaw-bones which sharpens or lessens this

angle, and which is illustrated in the negro countenance and in the

lowest savages.

The Professor ceased to speak, and the audience broke out into loud

and unanimous applause. For of course my uncle was right, and wiser

men than his nephew would have had some trouble to refute his

statements.

Another remarkable thing. This fossil body was not the only one in

this immense catacomb. We came upon other bodies at every step

amongst this mortal dust, and my uncle might select the most curious

of these specimens to demolish the incredulity of sceptics.

In fact it was a wonderful spectacle, that of these generations of

men and animals commingled in a common cemetery. Then one very

serious question arose presently which we scarcely dared to suggest.

Had all those creatures slided through a great fissure in the crust

of the earth, down to the shores of the Liedenbrock sea, when they

were dead and turning to dust, or had they lived and grown and died

here in this subterranean world under a false sky, just like

inhabitants of the upper earth? Until the present time we had seen

alive only marine monsters and fishes. Might not some living man,

some native of the abyss, be yet a wanderer below on this desert

strand?