THE LAPSE OF TIME. IO; 



chattel, a beast of burden, a slave, a stewardess, a 

 domestic ornament, an equal, or a master 1 . Let it be 

 granted that many of these customs and sentiments may 

 have been contemporaneous in their growth or develop- 

 ment, the same thing cannot be admitted of the dif- 

 ferent centres of colonization in which, they grew and 

 developed. Men do not without cause quit their ances- 

 tral homes to found colonies in remote parts of the 

 world; and the causes only arise at intervals. When 

 the cause has arisen, and the new settlement been 

 occupied, the exiles retain for the most part, and long 

 retain in affectionate remembrance the manners and 

 customs, the religion and laws, of the mother-country ; 

 or when the remembrance is other than affectionate, 

 they retain them from the want of an alternative, from 

 the conservatism in which all men to a greater or less 

 degree participate, from the incapacity of the human 

 mind to strike out new customs, or revolutionize ideas, 

 except by a gradual and half-unconscious progression. 



Among the visible and tangible proofs of man's and 

 the earth's antiquity, few are more interesting than 

 those presented in the section, well known to geologists, 

 cut by the railway through the delta of the Tiniere, 

 a torrent flowing into the Lake of Geneva 2 . Three 

 layers of vegetable soil appear in the section, at depths 

 of four and ten and nineteen feet respectively below the 



1 See chapter on Marriage, in Sir J. Lubbock's ' Origin of Civiliza- 

 tion.' 



2 Sir J. Lubbock, ' Prehistoric Times,' p. 380 ; Sir C. Lyell, 'Anti- 

 quity of Man,' p, 27. 



