128 GEOLOGY AND HISTORY 



time with many important species of land animals, 

 once the contemporaries of man, but now known 

 only as fossils. These ancient men are those called 

 by geologists later pleistocene, or post-glacial, or the 

 men of the cave and gravel deposits, or of the 

 age of the mammoth, and who have been designated 

 by archaeologists palaeolithic men, or, more properly, 

 palaeocosmic men, since the character of their stone 

 implements is only one not very important feature 

 of their history, and implements of the palaeolithic 

 type have been used in all periods, and indeed are 

 still used in some places. 



3. The prevalence among geologists of an ex- 

 aggerated and unreasonable uniformitarianism, which 

 refused to allow sufficient prominence to sudden 

 cataclysms arising from the slow accumulation of 

 natural forces, and which was a natural reaction 

 from the convulsive geology of an earlier period, has 

 caused the idea to be generally entertained that the 

 age of palaeocosmic men was of vast duration, and 

 passed only by slow gradations and a gradual tran- 

 sition into the new conditions of the modern period. 

 This view long was, and still is, an obstacle to any 

 rational correlation of the geological and traditional 

 history of man. Recently, however, new views have 

 been forced on geologists, and have led many of the 

 most sagacious observers and reasoners to see that 

 the palanthropic period is much nearer to us than we 

 had imagined. The arguments for this I have re- 

 ferred to in previous pages, and need not reiterate 



