EARLY MAN 469 



whereas the name Pleistocene should not be extended to the 

 Post-glacial age. The close of the Glacial period, introducing 

 great physical and climatal changes, some new species of 

 mammalia and man himself, should be regarded as the end of 

 the Pleistocene, and the introduction of what some French 

 geologists have called the Anthropic period, which I have else- 

 where divided into Palanthropic, corresponding to the so-called 

 Palaeolithic age, and Neanthropic, corresponding to the later 

 stone and metal ages. 1 These may be termed respectively the 

 earlier and later stages of the Modern period as distinguished 

 from the Pleistocene Tertiary. 



In point of logical arrangement, and especially of geological 

 classification, the division into historic and pre-historic periods 

 is decidedly objectionable. Even in Europe the historic age 

 of the south is altogether a different thing from that of the 

 north, and to speak of the pre-historic period in Greece and in 

 Britain or Norway as indicating the same portion of time is 

 altogether illusory. Hence a large portion of the discussion of 

 this subject has to be properly called " the overlap of history." 

 Further, the mere accident of the presence or absence of his- 

 torical documents cannot constitute a geological period com- 

 parable with such periods as the Pleistocene and Pliocene, and 

 the assumption of such a criterion of time merely confuses our 

 ideas. On the one hand, while the whole Tertiary or Kaino- 

 zoic, up to the present day, is one great geological period, 

 characterized by a continuous though gradually changing fauna 

 and series of physical conditions, and there is consequently 

 no good basis for setting apart, as some geologists do, a 

 Quaternary as distinct from the Tertiary period ; on the other 

 hand, there is a distinct physical break between the Pliocene 

 and the Modern in the great Glacial age. This, in its Arctic 

 climate and enormous submergence of the land, though it 

 did not exterminate the fauna of the northern hemisphere, 

 1 " Modern Science in Bible Lands." 



