64 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



old -school geologists have found it much, more convenient to 

 ignore than to answer it. 



Then, lastly, the same observations apply to the abundant evi- 

 dence which Quaternary geology has supplied that man was living 

 before the mammoth and its compeers were all destroyed. The 

 spirited outline of a living mammoth has been left to us by some 

 incipient Landseer of a not very ancient world. The consequences 

 which are involved in this fact were long evaded never faced or 

 followed just as the consequences were long evaded of marine 

 gravels heaped upon the tops or the high flanks of our existing 

 mountains. When palaeolithic implements were first discovered, 

 not' many years ago, both the religious and the agnostic world 

 were fluttered and excited. The one hoped for, and the other 

 feared, the establishment of some hitherto undreamed-of antiquity 

 for man. Both of them forgot that those old implements have, in- 

 tellectually as well as physically, a double edge. They may serve 

 to establish the extreme recency of some great convulsion far 

 more than they tend to prove the extreme antiquity of the creat- 

 ures affected by it. With an instinctive dread of this alternative, 

 vigorous attempts have been made to treat all implement -bearing 

 gravels as fluviatile the work of existing rivers and the spoil of 

 existing water-sheds. It has been felt that indefinite drafts might 

 then be drawn upon the bank of time because the implement- 

 bearing gravels are often at high levels, and existing rivers must 

 have been at work for some indefinite number of ages to cut their 

 way down to the present lower channels. But again these at- 

 tempts have broken down. Human implements it is confessed 

 have now been found abundantly in gravels which must have 

 been at least spread and redistributed not by rivers, but by the 

 sea.* Moreover, it is admitted that the old implement-bearing 

 gravels often exhibit the marks of "tumultuous action." Thus 

 all along the line Quaternary geology has established not only the 

 possibility, but the certainty, of many of those events which Prof. 

 Huxley presumes to denounce as " particularly absurd." Every 

 year is opening up some new vista through the thick clouds which 

 envelop the Quaternary ages. Prof. Prestwich may almost be said 

 to be the father of this geology in England. No one man has done 

 so much for it ; no one has been so minute and laborious in re- 

 search, or so careful and conscientious in reasoning on its facts. 

 The very last result he has arrived at f is the probable discovery 

 of the lowest stratum, or the base bed, of the Quaternary series in 

 England. And what is it ? It is a thick bed of marine gravel 

 overlying an old terrestrial surface on which now extinct mam- 



* The Great Ice Age, by James Geikie, pp. 505, 506. 



f Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, February, 1890, p. 85. 



