216 THE LAW. 



with the lion and hysena, hunted the gigantic Irish deer 

 on the plains, and speared the mammoth and mastodon 

 in its forests. Nor would such a discovery militate in 

 any way against the facts of history, so far as these are 

 known, with anything like demonstrable certainty. The 

 facts and their order remain the same ; it is only the chron- 

 ology, about which the ablest historians still differ so widely, 

 that could possibly be affected. Moreover, while reasoning 

 about the advent and progress of man, let it ever be re- 

 membered, that the higher the race the more rapid its cul- 

 mination ; and that we have no standard in the develop- 

 ment of the lower creatures impelled solely by instinct, 

 wherewith to measure the progress of man guided by reason, 

 and capable of making the elements of nature subservient 

 to his elevation and to his dispersion over every region of 

 the globe. On the whole, and as geological evidence now 

 stands, man, though the noblest, is one of the latest emana- 

 tions of creative wisdom crowning, as it were, that long 

 line of gradational vitality which apparently began with 

 the Silurian epoch, but whose further progress and termina- 

 tion lies in the mysteries of the future. 



And here it must be observed that Geology, though often 

 indiscreetly summoned to pronounce, can throw little or no 

 light on certain questions respecting the advent and early 

 condition of our race. The varieties of the human family, 

 distinguished and described by ethnographers, are alto- 

 gether unknown to Geology ; and, so far as the stone-im- 

 plements, the cave-fires, and the tree-canoes of the pleisto- 

 cene epoch are concerned, they are such as might readily 

 be formed by any of the savage tribes of the present day. 

 Whether, therefore, man originated in one centre or in 

 many centres whether the several known races are separate 

 creations, or merely time-distributed varieties, of the same 

 one-created species Geology can give no certain reply. Not 



