334 ANNUAL OF SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY. 



that the deposit embedding both is tho general dihwium, or mammalian 

 drift; do these facts of themselves determine the flints to have been fashioned 

 in an age preceding- the usually assigned birth of man? Logically, it must 

 be conceded, they do not ; for, independent of the absence or presence of 

 these or other vestiges of man in the diluvium, its antiquity or relation to 

 historic time is obviously not ascertainable. Apart from human relics in or 

 over or under the drift, how can we link it on to historic time at all ? Before 

 the discovery 7 of the flint-implements in this superficial formation, or so 

 long as the traces of men were known only in deposits later than the dilu- 

 vium, it was deemed to belong to an age antecedent to the creation of man, 

 and had, therefore, a relatively high antiquity assigned to it; but now, grant- 

 ing that relics of men have been authenticated as buried in it, is it sound 

 reasoning, we would ask, to infer for these relics the very antiquity which 

 was only attributable to the diluvium because it was believed destitute of all 

 such human vestiges ? The diluvium of geologists has. since the days of 

 the illustrious Cuvier, been always looked upon as something very ancient, 

 simply because he and his successors, finding it replete with the remains of 

 huge land mammals no longer living, never succeeded in detecting in it a 

 solitary bone or tooth of a human being, nor, indeed, anything indicative of 

 man's existence; but now that things indicative of man have been found, it 

 is surely illogical, and a begging of the very question itself, to impute an age 

 incompatible with the fact of his then existing. 



"As matters now stand, is it not as rational to infer the relative recency of 

 the extinct ElepJias primigenius, and the other mammals of the diluvium, 

 from the coexistence of the works of men with them, on the ground that the 

 human is a living and modem race, as it is to deduce the antiquity of man 

 from the once erroneously assumed greater age of those animals ? I would 

 repeat, then, that a specially remote age is not attributable to the flint-carving 

 men of the diluvium, simply because it is the diluvium, or mammoth-embed- 

 ding gravel, which contains them. If their association with these extinct 

 mammals does intimate a long pre-historic antiquity, the evidences of this 

 are to be sought in some of the other attendant phenomena. 



" The age, therefore, of the diluvium which encloses the remains of the 

 extinct mammalian animals must now be viewed as doubly uncertain, 

 doubtful from the uncertainty of its coincidence with the age of flint-imple- 

 ments; and, again, doubtful, even if this coincidence were established, from 

 the absence of any link of connection between those earliest traces of man 

 and his historic ages." 



As regards the question involved in this inquiry, What lapse of ages has it 

 demanded to alter the surface of the globe, where these remains are found, 

 from a state especially suited to the extinct antediluvian races, into that now 

 prevailing? the data are altogether too indeterminate to admit of anything 

 approaching a definite answer. "As in every other attempt to interrogate 

 Geology, her response is Sybilline. She has two classes of votaries: one, 

 entitled the Uniformitarian school, or Quietists, who, interpreting the past 

 changes in the earth's surface by the natural forces, especially the gentler 

 ones now in operation, overlook the more energetic and promptly-acting 

 ones; and another, the school ot the Catastrophtets, perhaps more fitly 

 defined the Paroxysmists, who, blind in the opposite eye, see only the most 

 vehement energies of nature, the earthquake and the inundation, and 

 take no account of the softer but unceasingly efficient agencies which gradu- 



