476 EARLY MAN 



anywhere. In the later period all this is changed. Britain 

 has become an island. Its gigantic Post-glacial fauna has dis- 

 appeared. Its human inhabitants are now small in stature and 

 delicate in feature, and represented to this day by parts of the 

 population of the south of Wales and Ireland. They buried 

 their dead in the peculiar cemeteries known as long barrows, 

 and their implements and weapons are of a new type, previously 

 unknown. All this shows a great interval of physical and 

 organic mutation. In connection with this we have the high- 

 level gravel and rubble, which Prestwich has shown to belong 

 to this stage, and which proves a subsidence even greater than 

 that to be inferred from the present diminution of the land 

 area. Knowing as we do that the close of the Glacial period 

 was not more than 8,000 years ago, and deducting from this 

 the probable duration of the Palanthropic age on the one hand, 

 and that of modern history on the other, we must admit that 

 the interval left for the great physical and faunal changes above 

 referred to is too small to permit them to have occurred as the 

 result of slow and gradual operations. Considerations of this 

 kind have indeed some of the best authorities on the subject, 

 as Cartailhac, Forel, and de Mortillet, to hold that there is 

 " an immense space, a great gap, during which the fauna was 

 renewed, and after which a new race of men suddenly made its 

 appearance, and polished stone instead of chipping it, and sur- 

 rounded themselves with domestic animals." 1 There is thus, in 

 the geological history of man an interval of physical and organic 

 change, corresponding to that traditional and historical deluge 

 which has left its memory with all the more ancient nations. 

 Thus our men of the Palanthropic, Post-glacial or Mammoth 

 age are the same we have been accustomed to call Antediluvians, 

 and their immediate successors are identical with the Basques 



1 Quatrefages, "The Human Species." The interval should not, how- 

 ever, be placed after the reindeer period, as this animal occurs in both 

 ages. 



