Thus was ended the contention of Mr.Southall.
Still another attack upon the new scientific conclusions came from France, when in 1883 the Abbe Hamard, Priest of the Oratory, published his Age of Stone and Primitive Man.

He had been especially vexed at the arrangement of prehistoric implements by periods at the Paris Exposition of 1878; he bitterly complains of this as having an anti-Christian tendency, and rails at science as "the idol of the day." He attacks Mortillet, one of the leaders in French archaeology, with a great display of contempt; speaks of the "venom" in books on prehistoric man generally; complains that the Church is too mild and gentle with such monstrous doctrines; bewails the concessions made to science by some eminent preachers; and foretells his own martyrdom at the hands of men of science.
Efforts like this accomplished little, and a more legitimate attempt was made to resist the conclusions of archaeology by showing that knives of stone were used in obedience to a sacred ritual in Egypt for embalming, and in Judea for circumcision, and that these flint knives might have had this later origin.

But the argument against the conclusions drawn from this view was triple: First, as we have seen, not only stone knives, but axes and other implements of stone similar to those of a prehistoric period in western Europe were discovered; secondly, these implements were discovered in the hard gravel drift of a period evidently far earlier than that of Mena; and, thirdly, the use of stone implements in Egyptian and Jewish sacred functions within the historic period, so far from weakening the force of the arguments for the long and slow development of Egyptian civilization from the men who used rude flint implements to the men who built and adorned the great temples of the early dynasties, is really an argument in favour of that long evolution.

A study of comparative ethnology has made it clear that the sacred stone knives and implements of the Egyptian and Jewish priestly ritual were natural survivals of that previous period.

For sacrificial or ritual purposes, the knife of stone was considered more sacred than the knife of bronze or iron, simply because it was ancient; just as to-day, in India, Brahman priests kindle the sacred fire not with matches or flint and steel, but by a process found in the earliest, lowest stages of human culture--by violently boring a pointed stick into another piece of wood until a spark comes; and just as to-day, in Europe and America, the architecture of the Middle Ages survives as a special religious form in the erection of our most recent churches, and to such an extent that thousands on thousands of us feel that we can not worship fitly unless in the midst of windows, decorations, vessels, implements, vestments, and ornaments, no longer used for other purposes, but which have survived in sundry branches of the Christian Church, and derived a special sanctity from the fact that they are of ancient origin.
Taking, then, the whole mass of testimony together, even though a plausible or very strong argument against single evidences may be made here and there, the force of its combined mass remains, and leaves both the vast antiquity of man and the evolution of civilization from its lowest to its highest forms, as proved by the prehistoric remains of Egypt and so many other countries in all parts of the world, beyond a reasonable doubt.