48 LIFE ON THE EARTH. 



If we take as the first of the problems to be exa- 

 mined on this subject, that which seems the most 

 likely to be answered on satisfactory evidence, viz. 

 the geological antiquity of the human race, w r e find 

 clear though incomplete testimony leading to a sure 

 and definite conclusion. Man and the works of man 

 have been preserved in natural repositories of higher 

 antiquity than all the mausoleums, and tumuli, and 

 vTroyaid', in caverns, peat-bogs, lacustrine and river- 

 sediments, which derived their characteristic features 

 from the operation of physical conditions long since 

 passed away. Thus deep in the sediments of many 

 of our British valleys left by the rivers in some 

 earlier period, we find the canoe of the primitive 

 inhabitant, hollowed by fire and rude stone chisels 

 from the trunk of the native oak. In Caverns near 

 Swansea, and near Narbonne, skeletons of the early 

 people have been found ; in those of Kent's hole and 

 Brixham and Sicily, and deep in the gravel of Amiens 

 and Abbeville, the flint instruments which served for 

 rude workmen in wood, rude diggers of the ground, 

 or rude warriors in the field. According to such 

 observations as we can make these facts can only be 

 explained by supposing a long period of time to 

 have elapsed since their occurrence. To heap twenty 

 or more feet of sediment over the buried canoes by 

 the ordinary operation of a river like the Yorkshire 



