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unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers, 

 lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly 

 extinct, had left their bones in the same deposits with human 

 implements as far north as Yorkshire. Moreover, connected with 

 this fact came in the new conviction, forced upon geologists by 

 the more careful examination of the earth and its changes, that 

 such elevations and depressions of Great Britain and other parts 

 of the world were not the results of sudden cataclysms, but of 

 slow processes extending through vast cycles of years — processes 

 such as are now known to be going on in various parts of the 

 world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand years allowed 

 by even the most liberal theologians of former times were seen 

 more and more clearly to be but as a mere nothing in the long 

 succession of ages since the appearance of man. 



Confirmation of these results came from various other parts 

 of the world, especially from the drift deposits both on the east- 

 ern and western coasts of America. The discoveries at Trenton, 

 New Jersey, and at various places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, 

 and elsewhere, along the southern edge of the drift of the glacial 

 epochs, clinched the new scientific truth yet more firmly ; and the 

 statement made by an eminent American authority is, that " man 

 was on this continent when the climate and ice of Greenland 

 extended to the mouth of New York Harbor." The discoveries of 

 prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British 

 Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable 

 contention by the adherents of the older view. As to these inves- 

 tigations on the Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries 

 of Whitney and others in California had been so made and an- 

 nounced that the judgment of scientific men regarding them was 

 suspended until the visit of perhaps the greatest living authority 

 in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1887. He confirmed 

 the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the statement that 

 " both the actual remains and works of man found deep under 

 the lava-fiows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the New 

 World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the 

 discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man ex- 

 isted in these regions, * valleys have been filled up by drift from 

 the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hun- 

 dred feet ; this covered by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava- 

 streams from volcanoes long since extinct, and finally cut down 

 by the present rivers through beds of solid basalt, and through 

 this accumulation of lavas and gravels." The immense antiquity 

 of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific coast is 

 summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared to 

 be proved, "first, by the present river systems being of subse- 

 quent date, sometimes cutting through them and their superin- 



