100 ERA OF THE SUPERFICIAL FORMATIONS. 



by great rivers at their efflux into the sea ; peat mosses ; and the 

 vegetable soil. The animal remains found in these generally 

 testify to a zoology on the verge of that now prevailing, or 

 melting into it, there being included many species which still 

 exist. In a lacustrine deposit at Market-Weighton, in the 

 Vale of York, there have been found bones of the elephant, 

 rhinoceros, bison, wolf, horse, felis, deer, birds, all or nearly all 

 presenting peculiarities different from existing species, asso- 

 ciated with thirteen species of land and fresh-water shells, 

 " exactly identical with types now living in the vicinity." In 

 similar deposits in North America, are remains of the mam- 

 moth, mastodon, buffalo, and other animals of extinct and living 

 types. In short, these superficial deposits show precisely such 

 remains as might be expected from a time at which the pre- 

 sent forms of the animal world had been generally assumed, 

 but yet so far remote in chronology as to allow of the dropping 

 of many species, through familiar causes perhaps we should 

 only say the obliteration of many peculiarities called specific 

 in the interval. Still, however, several of the most important 

 living species have left no record of themselves in any forma- 

 tion beyond what are, comparatively speaking, modern. Such 

 are the sheep and goat, and such, above all, is our own species. 

 We thus learn that, compared with many humbler animals, 

 man is a being, as it were, of yesterday. 



[Since the above was written, English geologists have ac- 

 cepted a series of facts implying the existence of the human 

 race at a stage of the Drift era prior to the extinction of the 

 animals of the bone-caves. At various depths up to twenty 

 feet, in the naturally disposed chalk gravel near the banks of 

 the Somme in Picardy, have been found multitudes of flint 

 implements, rudely chiselled by the human hand, and appa- 

 rently designed to serve as spear-heads. They obviously infer 

 that a primitive savage people resided here before the depo- 

 sition of this chalk gravel an event of vast, but unknown an- 

 tiquity. To the same purport has been the discovery of similar 

 flint implements in certain bone- caves, both in Sicily and 

 England.] 



