SUBDIVISIONS AND CONDITIONS 73 



fitted for a mild climate. In this case we should 

 expect that these earliest men would leave behind 

 them scarcely any weapons or implements except 

 of the simplest kind, and that their apparent pro- 

 gress in the arts of war and the chase might in 

 reality be evidence, up to a certain point at least, of 

 increasing barbarism. Primitive as well as modern 

 men present in these respects strange paradoxes. 



We have to inquire in the sequel as to the cause 

 of- the final disappearance of the palaeocosmic men, 

 and as to the question whether history is cognisant of 

 any such human period as that which has occupied us 

 in this chapter, or whether, as has sometimes been 

 assumed, it is altogether prehistoric. 



On the subject of the correlation of the French 

 and Belgian discoveries as to primitive man, a most 

 interesting and important communication was made 

 by Dupont to the Geological Society of Belgium in 

 I892. 1 The veteran explorer of the Belgian caves 

 addresses himself in this paper to a careful comparison 

 of the geological relations, animal remains and human 

 relics in these caves, and in the gravels and ' quater- 

 nary ' clays associated with them. He arrives at the 

 conclusion, which I had already stated, 2 that these 

 deposits are contemporaneous and show similar 

 stages, but that the mammoth age properly so-called, 

 in which the primitive people fed on the mam- 



1 Bulletin de la Societt Beige de Gtologie, Janvier 1893. This paper 

 should be studied by all interested in the subject. 



2 Fossil Men. 



