14: Transactions of the Kansas 



classification of geological epochs, dug up human remains and worked flints, now 

 recognized as belonging to the quaternary. Justice will be done to J ages, who in 

 1825 recognized the great antiquity of the Constadt skull, which was discovered 

 upwards of a century earlier, and was for a long time considered apocryphal ; but 

 with due praise to those early workers, it is Boucher De Perthes who will receive 

 the homage due the bold wrestler who maintained the final struggle and came off 

 the victor. 



"The year 1859 beheld the theory of the antiquity of man burst upon the scien- 

 tific world with irresistible force. * * All Europe, geologists, anthropologists, 

 archeologists, threw themselves into the work with startling energy. Only eighteen 

 yenrs have now elapsed, and never, perhaps, in so short a time has such a rich har- 

 vest been gathered. Who can forget those days of his life when, from the bowels of 

 the earth, from the depth of caverns, sounded the voice of tlie past, and tlie fossil 

 communities lived again. * * Boucher De Perthes had only lifted a corner of 

 that mysterious veil which hides the origin of man, and had proved that man had 

 existed throughout the quaternary epochs, that he had been in France the contem- 

 porary of the reindeer, and animals which now only exist elsewhere, and of the 

 mammoth and other extinct animals. But was this all V And was not the human 

 I'ace yet more ancient ? This last question presents itself at once, and even more 

 important than the other, for each of the three periods of the tertiary age was of 

 much greater duration than the quaternary. The researches concerning tertiary 

 man include the discoveries of M. Desnoyers, near Chartres, and of Prof. Ca- 

 pellini, in many tertiary sites in Tuscany, which tend to establish the fact of the 

 existence of man in the pliocene age; those of Abbe Bourgeois of Thenay, would carry 

 back even to the miocene age — that is, to the middle tertiary — the existence of an 

 intelligent being who could work flints, and could only be man. * * But ter- 

 tiary man is yet only on the threshold of revival, and the evidence in his support re- 

 quires more definite proof. * * Quaternary man, on the other hand, has now 

 become classical. He has been found in most parts of Europe, and in many places 

 in the New World. His weapons and implements have been found and preserved 

 by hundreds of thousands. * * There are got materials from the earth of valleys in 

 which the relative position of the strata is enough to mark their date; at others from 

 deposits rich in natural flints, where quaternary man had established his work- 

 shops; here, in the rock shelter where he camped; there, in the caves in which he 

 lived. In the cave dwelling places the finds have been most abundant, antl we 

 have been able to study even the details of the life of a tribe, the remains of repasts, 

 the weapons for the chase and for fishing, the sewing implements, all the products 

 of the flint worker, to which may be added at a certain period, handsome imple- 

 ments of bone and reindeer horn; then, the symbols of power, ornaments, oljects 

 of commerce, the works of artists, sometimes rude and uncivilized, at other times 

 full of grace, motion and truth, represented by engraving or sculpture, the animals 

 hunted in those days— the bull, horse, aurochs, reindeer, the great cave bear, and 

 the gigantic mammoth. Quaternary man has his chronology, not one of years or 

 periods, like ours, but of archeological and paleontological periods, vast spaces of 

 time, taking date according to the various fossil species which predominated unceas- 

 ing around him, and according to the difi'erent types of implements marking the 

 gradual evolution of his work. He has his history also, not indeed political, but 

 anthropological; not that of peoples and chiefs who became celebrated, but that of 

 races who supplanted and succeeded one another on the same soil." 



So much for quaternary man, but what of a still older than he ? We have seen 

 that intimations have been discovered of tertiary man — that pliocene man is a prob- 



