80 ANIMAL LIFE AS A GEOLOGICAL AGENCY. 



found with them, and, in rare cases, in the stomachs of some of 

 them, are those of yet extant plants ; and besides this evidence, 

 the discovery of works of human art, deposited in juxtaposition 

 with fossil bones, and evidently at the same time and by the same 

 agency which buried these latter — not to speak of human bones 

 found in the same strata — ^proves that the animals whose former 

 existence they testify were contemporaneous with man, and pos- 

 sibly even extirpated by him.* I do not propose to enter upon 

 the thorny question, whether the existing races of man are genea- 

 logically connected with these ancient types of humanity, and I 

 advert to these facts only for the sake of the suggestion, that man, 



the globe. The human bodies deposited in the catacombs during the long, 

 long ages of Egyptian history, would perhaps build as large a pile as one 

 generation of the quadrupeds of the United States. In the barbarous days of 

 old Moslem warfare, the conquerors erected large pyramids of human skulls. 

 The soil of cemeteries in the great cities of Europe has sometimes been raised 

 several feet by the deposit of the dead during a few generations. In the East, 

 Turks and Christians alike bury bodies but a couple of feet beneath the sur- 

 face. The grave is respected as long as the tombstone remains, but the sepul- 

 chres of the ignoble poor, and of those whose monuments time or accident has 

 removed, 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 OJiamp des Morts, at Pera, by the naked eye alone, shows the 

 observer that it consists almost exclusively of the comminuted bones of his 

 fellow-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 found wrought by contemporary man 

 into arms and utensils, or split to extract the marrow. These accounts have 

 often been discredited, because it has been assumed that the extinction of these 

 animals was more ancient than the existence of man. Recent discoveries ren- 

 der it certain that this latter conclusion has been too hastily adopted. 



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 can not be supposed to have extirpated, have also become extinct, he 

 argues that the disappearance of the quadrupeds in question can not be ascribed 

 to human action alone. 



On this point it may be observed that, as we can not know what precise 

 physical conditions were necessary to the existence of a given extinct organ- 

 ism, we can not 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. 



