82 ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 
and possibly even extirpated by him.* Ido not propose to 
enter upon the thorny question, whether the existing races of 
man are genealogically connected with these ancient types of 
humanity, and I advert to these facts only for the sake of the 
suggestion, that man, in his earliest known stages of existence, 
was probably a destructive power upon the earth, though per- 
haps not so emphatically as his present representatives. 
The larger wild animals are not now numerous enough in any 
one region to form extensive deposits by their remains; but 
they have, nevertheless, a certain geographical importance. If 
the myriads of large browsing and grazing quadrupeds which 
wander over the plains of Southern Africa—and the slaughter 
of which by thousands is the source of a ferocious pleasure and 
Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the surface. 
The graye is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepultures 
of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has re- 
moved, are opened again and again to receive fresh occupants. Hence the 
ground in Oriental cemeteries is pervaded with relics of humanity, if not 
wholly composed of them ; and an examination of the soil of the lower part of 
the Petit Champ des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the ob- 
server that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his fel- 
low-man. 
* The bones of mammoths and mastodons, in many instances, appear to 
have been grazed or cut by flint arrow-heads or other stone weapons, and the 
bones of animals now extinct are often wrought into arms and utensils, or 
split to extract the marrow. These accounts have often been discredited, be- 
cause it has been assumed that the extinction of these animals was more 
ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries render it certain that 
this conclusion has been too hastily adopied. 
On page 143 of the Antiquity of Man, Lyell remarks that man ‘‘ no doubt 
played his part in hastening the era of the extinction” of the large pachyderms 
and beasts of prey ; but, as contemporaneous species of other animals, which 
man cannot be supposed to haye extirpated, have also become extinct, he 
argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question cannot be 
ascribed to human action alone. 
On this point it may be observed that, as we cannot know what precise 
physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organ- 
ism, we cannot say how far such conditions may have been modified by the 
action of man, and he may therefore have influenced the life of such organ- 
isms in ways, and to an extent, of which we can form no just idea, 
