ALLEOED INDICATIONS OF A CATASTROPHE. 363 



with some wide-spread flood. Such a flood would scour the 

 country and mix gravel and bones together ; would force the 

 bones, &:c. into the inner recesses of the caverns, and drive 

 the fseces, as Falconer found them driven, into the roofs of 

 the caves ; would rush through the valleys and enter any 

 holes there were in their sides ; avouM drown great beasts, 

 and would as easily carry their carcases along ; would sweep 

 up land-shells and flsh as well as mammals, and pile all 

 together in heterogeneous masses," 



The Duke of Argyle, in his address to the Edinburgh 

 Geological Society in 1883," after referring to facts such as 

 have been mentioned, added — " Nothing, I think, but the 

 bondage of a theoiy which is not founded on any sound 

 philosophy could banish from our consideration the high pro- 

 bability of one single explanation, which is this, — that in 

 very recent times great changes in the moulding of the 

 earth's surface over a great part of Europe occurred with 

 sufiicient rapidity to cause a great destruction of animal life, 

 and, during the j^rogress of a wide submergence, to sweep 

 the bodies of the drowned creatures into fissures and swallow- 

 holes which wei'e opened or enlarged at the time." 



One of the most interesting features of the facts alleged 

 in this connection is the recognition by competent observers 

 of a complete break, a hiatus between the human remains 

 found among the extinct fauna referred to, representing 

 ])algeolithic man, and those of the later, but still ancient 

 neolithic a2,e. With pleistocene, palaeolithic man a com- 

 plete fauna disappeared. With neolithic man a new fauna 

 appeared. Chief among the differences between the fauna 

 of the two periods is the large introduction of domestic 

 animals in the later period. The complete and sharply- 

 defined disappearance of one type of man with a distinct 

 fauna and flora, and their replacement by a new type of man 

 with a new and distinct fauna and flora, is said to argrue the 

 complete destruction of the one and an entirely separate and 

 distinct new beginning through the occupation of the old 

 distri6t by a fresh migration. 



. The facts put forth in the argument referred to are very 

 numerous, and are gathered from all parts of the world, 

 though nowhere, perhaps, so frequent and pronounced as in 

 the case of the Siberian mammoth. They point to the 

 operation of one common cau e of a cataclysmic character, 

 involving some great cosmic change probably, that must as 

 to Siberia account for an instantaneous change from a tern- 



