the foundations for the reception of Charles Darwin’sOrigin of Species
(1859). 3 ‘God is eternal, but man is very old’, had said Jacques Boucher de
Perthes (1788–1868) in hisCeltic and Antediluvian Antiquities(1857). As
Donald Grayson remarks, if not many inXuential scientists agreed with him
then, the situation completely changed over the following two years (Grayson
1983: xi). The debate about the human presence on the earth had been
lingering for several decades. The general understanding was that human
existence was a recent event, by which some meant about six to eight
thousand years, and others a shorter period. It was in the 1840s that
discoveries made by natural historians interested in geology and palaeon-
tology and by antiquarians were combined by the French oYcer of customs
and amateur geologist, Jacques Boucher de Cre`vecœur de Perthes (usually
referred to as Jacques Boucher de Perthes). He beneWted from several devel-
opments: the early eighteenth-century recognition of the stone tools as
human-made, the acceptance of the stratigraphic method, and, a century
later, of the dating of strata on the basis of fossil remains, including already
extinct animals. Boucher de Perthes’Wnding of stone tools in very ancient
layers had been preceded by that made by John Frere (1740–1807), a high
sheriVof SuVolk and later a Member of Parliament. A letter he had sent to the
Society of Antiquaries in 1797 was published three years later in its journal,
Archaeologia. In it he described his discovery of a site in eastern England with
Xint implements beneath very ancient deposits. The scholarship at the time
was not ready, however, to receive this publication and it went unnoticed for
almost sixty years (Grayson 1983).
The main impediment for the acceptance of human antiquity was the
consideration of the Bible as a historical account, and the discussion about
this, especially about the signiWcance of the Flood in the light of the new
data provided by geologists and palaeontologists, led to many debates in
theWrst half of the nineteenth century. The scholars in these early years
included, in Britain, the geologist William Buckland (1784–1856), who indi-
cated that the pre-Deluge peoples were to be found in central or southern
Asia and opposed Boucher’s ideas. As a reader in geology in Oxford, he
trained Charles Lyell (1797–1875). Lyell’s Principles of Geology(1830–3)
would be very inXuential, but his deep religious beliefs seem to have pre-
vented him from accepting humans’ antiquity until the 1850s. He considered
3 The debate about human antiquity and that on the evolution of species, however, were not
connected events. Antiquity did not imply evolutionism. Creationists also believed in the
antiquity of man. As Grayson explains, ‘The length of the human existence and the transform-
ation of species were the burning issues of life history during the late 1850s and early 1860s, but
at the time that a deep human antiquity was established, they were fully separable issues’
(Grayson 1983: 5).
Liberal Revolutions (c. 1820–1860) 355