Miscellaneous

King Country Chronicle, Volume III, Issue 171, 8 July 1909, Page 4

Miscellaneous

WAS PARADISE AT THE NORTH POLE ? The cradle of the human rac: has always been a favourite subject of inquiry, both scientific and non-scienti-fic; and speculation has run riot in attempts to locate the Garden of Eden. In our own day scholars and trained theologians like Cheyne, Frederick Delitsch, Gunkel, St. Clair, and others have propounded new locations for Eden almost solely on the ground of new conjectural identifications of the four rivers of the Paradise described in Genesis. The sites proposed are widely distant from one another and include Jerusalem, Somaliland,in Africa, a place in German Rheinland, and the Scilly Islands. In an interesting article on the recent literature on this subject in the Methodist Review for November and December, Dr William F. Warren wisely remarks that the discovery of the unknown country in which our race originated took its place among the living tenantry of the earth, must be by proper .scientific methods

To students of language, of early arts, of social institutions, civilisation, government, religion, no less than to the anthropologist, a knowledge of the true starting point of the development about to be studied by them is a desideratum comparable to no other. The fact is that a comprehensive treatment of the problem—a treatment in which all the lines of evidence entitled to a hearing are taken into account —is extremely rare. Trained scientists and untrained writers in scientific lines have often taken the data of some one field of nature knowledge and have therefrom attempted to show where the cradleland of our race must have been. Thus one has used facts of geography only, another the teaching of the biology of his day, another the views of contemporary paleontologists, another the facts of early language history, racial characteristics, ethnic relationships, and so on. It is in this way that hypotheses have been advanced according to which the human species originated in Equatorial Africa, in Australia, in Southern Asia, and possibly at the Poles, — the blacks at the southern and the whites at the northern. But by no such narrow procedures as these is this problem of problems ever to be solved. Twenty-four years ago Dr Warren himself published a more comprehensive treatment of the subject than hi-.'\ ever before been attempted; ar,<! his work, entilted "Paradise Found : The Cradle of the Human Race at the North Pole" has since gone through eleven editions.