a o. 
15 
still roved the south of Europe), in which he familiarly des- 
cribes their diseases—their tastes ; for example, their love of 
curiosities, as evinced by fossil collections of shells, &c. ; their 
warlike habits, as evinced by the skeletons of men not being 
found in the same proportion as the women who died at home; 
and he talks of their industry, superstition, and respect for the 
dead, all of which he infers from circumstances connected 
with either the position or material of the objects found in 
the caves; and this brings us to the much debated question, 
Was man co-existent with any, and if so, with which of 
the extinct animals? Geologists have hitherto held that 
man was a subsequent creation, but many facts have recently 
come to light, which if they do not carry the existence of 
man farther back in the vista of years, certainly bring the 
existence of extinct fossil animals farther towards our own 
time. It is not many years since a Mammoth was discovered 
in arctic Russia frozen up in a mass of ice, not only in a fossil 
condition, but with flesh on his enormous bones, tufts of 
coarse reddish hair and bristles on his hard leathery skin, and 
even the eyes perfect. The Mastodon has been discovered in 
America, associated with some of those mysterious remains of 
human work in some far far off age, and it has even been 
suggested that these vast marvels were used as beasts of 
burden to carry some of the ingeniously carved masses which 
are occasionally found, though I must confess a Mastodon 
with a packsaddle, or a Mammoth with a crupper, are quite 
opposed to all one’s notions of the dignity of the primeval 
giants! Theextinct Irish Elk has been discovered in Ireland, 
not only associated with men’s bones, but with holes in the 
forehead, evidently caused by some fossil butcher’s axe, and 
at Wexford some remains of the Elk were discovered in so 
recent a condition that the Royal Dublin Soeiety made soup of 
the bones, whether they enjoyed it I can’t say, but it appears 
rather an Irish method of pursuing a Scientific investigation ! 
But then if, as we are told by some recent investigators, man 
existed in a state of civilization in the Nile valley 13,500 years 
ago, what are we to think? All our preconceived ideas of the 
age of the world are upset, and we can only reflect how very 
little we know, for certain, on any subject. I spoke, just now, 
of the azr teeming with life, but Natural History teaches us 
that the sea is sometimes literally converted into a living mass. 
