24 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



reindeer on which were etched the figures of mastodons, deer, and 

 horses. Caves in Saxony, Gibraltar, Austria, and many other 

 places have been discovered containing human bones. The hu- 

 man skeletons discovered in a modern limestone formation at 

 Guadaloupe, in the Windward Islands, are possibly of a later 

 period and are not even fossilized, though imbedded in compact 

 stone. In August, 1894, Herr Masclia, director of the Grammar 

 School at Predmost in Bohemia, who has for many years made 

 discoveries in that neighborhood ! and has found hundreds of 

 mammoth skeletons, has unearthed a family of six people a man 

 of enormous size and a woman and her children near to the re- 

 mains of mammoths ; this is said to be the furthest northeast that 

 primeval man has been discovered with the bones of antediluvian 

 animals. It is a pity that more exact information upon certain 

 interesting points has not come to hand. It is equally a pity 

 that all such treasures of the ancestry of our race should not be 

 preserved and indeed systematically sought for by professional 

 scientists and archat'ologists, for we know how those at Mentone 

 have been ruined and altered and their ornaments removed by 

 the peasant Abbo and his workmen before competent judges have 

 had any chance of observing the several different points of inter- 

 est that seem to require even more than the knowledge of the 

 anatomist and osteologist. These remains at Predmost and the 

 men whose bones have been discovered at Mentone must have 

 been coeval with the animals of either the Miocene, Pliocene, or 

 Glacial periods. But as late as the Glacial period the bones have 

 been discovered of mammoth and of extinct species of lions, bears, 

 rhinoceros, hyenas, reindeer, Irish elk, and of the Bos 'primige- 

 nius, animals that had also existed in the two earlier periods, and 

 with whose bones flint instruments have been in different places 

 discovered in fluviatile gravels and in caves. This, however, only 

 proves that man lived either during or just previous to the Gla- 

 cial period, the latest at which these animals existed. Till, how- 

 ever, the bones of man or his flint instruments can be found with 

 the bones of some animal that became extinct before the Glacial 

 period, we can not place him at any earlier date. 



If, however, man existed before or during the Glacial period, 

 it is strange that there should be no tradition of such a change 

 taking place on the earth's surface. It may be that the alteration 

 in temperature was so gradual, and extended over such a great 

 length of time, that the generations of men who succeeded each 

 other were unaware of it ; perhaps, too, almost imperceptibly to 

 themselves, the then existing races of men moved gradually to 

 warmer regions, keeping pace with the advance of cold, which 

 we must, in reasoning thus, suppose to have been so gradual that 

 at any rate nomadic races would not have noticed it by their tradi- 



