EARLY MAN 465 



with nature became aggravated by that between man and man. 

 Violence disturbed the progress of civilization, and favoured 

 the increase and power of the rudest tribes, while the more deli- 

 cately organized and finer types of humanity, if they continued 

 to exist in some favoured spots, were in constant danger of 

 being exterminated by their fiercer and stronger contemporaries. 



In mercy to humanity, this state of things wa,s terminated 

 by a great physical revolution, the last great subsidence of the 

 continents that Post-glacial flood, which must have swept 

 away the greater part of men, and many species of great beasts, 

 and left only a few survivors to re-people the world, just as the 

 mammoth and other gigantic animals had to give place to 

 smaller and feebler creatures. In these vicissitudes it seemed 

 determined, with reference to man, that the more gigantic and 

 formidable races should perish, and that one of the finer types 

 should survive to re-people the world. 



The age of which we have been writing the history, is that 

 which has been fitly named the Anthropic, in that earlier part 

 of it preceding the great diluvial catastrophe, which has fixed 

 itself in all the earlier traditions of men, and which separates 

 what may be called the Palanthropic or Antediluvian age from 

 the Neanthropic or Postdiluvian. Independently altogether of 

 human history, these are two geological ages distinguished by 

 different physical conditions and different species of animals ; 

 and the time has undoubtedly come when all the speculations 

 of archagologists respecting early man must be regulated by 

 these great geological facts, which are stamped upon those later 

 deposits of the crust of the earth, which have been laid down 

 since man was its inhabitant. If they have only recently as- 

 sumed their proper place in the geological chronology, this is 

 due to the great difficulty in the case of the more recent 

 deposits in establishing their actual succession and relations to 

 each other. These difficulties have, however, been overcome, 

 and new facts are constantly being obtained to render our 



