CHAP. XX. NOT INCONSISTENT AVITII FACTS. 399 



When commenting on the eagerness with which the doc- 

 trine of progression was embraced from the close of the last 

 century to the time when I first attempted, in 1830, to give 

 some account of the prevailing theories in geology, I observed 

 that far too much reliance was commonly placed on the re- 

 ceived dates of the first appearances of certain orders or classes 

 of animals or plants, such dates being determined by the age 

 of the stratum in which we then haj)pened to have discovered 

 the earliest memorials of such types. At that time (1830) it 

 was taken for granted that Man had not coexisted with the 

 mammoth and other extinct mammalia, yetnow^ that we have 

 traced back the signs of his existence to the Post-pliocene 

 era, and may anticipate the finding of his remains on some 

 future day in the Pliocene period, the theory of progression 

 is not shaken ; for we cannot expect to meet with human 

 bones in the Miocene formations, where all the sj)ecies and 

 nearly all the genera of mammalia belong to types widely 

 differing from those now living; and had some other rational 

 being, representing Man, then flourished, some signs of his 

 existence could hardly have escaped unnoticed, in the shape 

 of implements of stone or metal, more frequent and more 

 durable than the osseous remains of any of the mammalia. 



In the beginning of this century it was one of the canons 

 of the popular geological creed, that the first warm-blooded 

 quadrupeds which had inhabited this planet were those 

 derived from the Eocene gypsum of Montmartre in the 

 suburbs of Paris, almost all of which Cuvier had shown to 

 belong to extinct genera. This dogma continued in force for 

 more than a quarter of a century, in spite of the discovery 

 in 1818 of a marsupial quadruped in the Stonesfield strata, a 

 member of the lower oolite, near Oxford. Some disputed 

 the authority of Cuvier himself, as to the mammalian cha- 

 racter of the fossil; others, the accuracy of those who had 

 assigned to it so ancient a place in the chronological series 



