334 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Oct. 



Logan, is of this low, we may even say lowest, type of animal 

 organisation. 



Then step by step we are guided through the old Cambrian 

 Silurian systems, rich in Trilobites and Brachiopoda, the delights 

 of Salter and Davidson; with Agassiz and Miller, and Egerton,. 

 we read the history of the strange old fishes of Devonian rocks ; 

 Brongniart, and Goppert, and Dawson, and Binney, and Hooker 

 unveil the mystery of the mighty forests now converted to coal : 

 Man tell and Owen and Huxley restore for us the giant reptiles of 

 the Lias, Oolite, and the Wealden ; Edwards and "Wright almost, 

 revive the beauteous corals and echinodermata ; which with all 

 the preceding tribes have come and gone before the dawn of the 

 later periods, when fragments of mammoths and hippopotami were 

 buried in caves and river sediments to reward the researches of 

 Cuvier and Buckland, Prestwich and Christy, Lartet and Fal- 

 coner. 



And what is the latest term in this long series of successive 

 existence? Surely the monuments of ever-advancing art — the 

 temples whose origin is in caverns of the rocks ; the cities which 

 have taken the place of holes in the ground, or heaps of stones 

 and timber in a lake ; the ships which have outgrown the canoe, 

 as that was modelled from the floating trunk of a tree, are 

 sufficient proof of the late arrival of man upon the earth, 

 after it had undergone many changes, and had become adapted to 

 his physical, intellectual, and moral nature. 



Compared with the periods which elapsed in the accomplish- 

 ment of these changes, how short is the date of those yet standing 

 monoliths, cromlechs, and circles of unhewn-stone which are the 

 oldest of human structures raised in Western Europe, or of those 

 more regular fabrics which attest the early importance of the 

 monarchs and people of Egypt, Assyria, and some parts of 

 America! Yet tried by monuments of natural events which 

 happened within the age of man, the human family is old enough 

 in Western Europe to have been sheltered by caverns in the rocks, 

 while herds of reindeer roamed in Southern France (d), and bears 

 and hyenas were denizens of the south of England (e). More 



(^) See the Memoirs of M. Lartet on the Caves of the Dordogne, 

 1863-4. 



(e) la the caves of Gower, Devon, and Somerset, flint flakes occur 

 with several extinct animals. 



