EXCURSIONS OF AN EVOLUTIONIST 



beginning to assume its present temperate and 

 equable character. 



At this remote epoch Europe had already been 

 inhabited by human beings during several thou- 

 sand years. How long before the beginning of 

 the Pleistocene period man had arrived in Eu- 

 rope is still open to question ; but there is no 

 doubt whatever that he lived in Gaul and Britain 

 as a contemporary of the big-nosed rhinoceros, 

 and before the arrival of the arctic mammalia 

 which were driven from the north as the glacial 

 cold set in. This race of man described by 

 Mr. Boyd Dawkins as the "River-drift Man" 

 is probably now as extinct as the cave-bear 

 or the mammoth. Late in the Pleistocene period 

 it disappeared from Europe, and was replaced 

 by a new race, coming from the northeast, along 

 with the musk-sheep and reindeer, and called 

 by the same eminent writer the " Cave-Man." 

 Both the Cave-men and River-drift men were 

 in the stage of culture known as the Palaeolithic, 

 or Old Stone Age ; that is, they used only stone 

 implements, and these implements were never 

 polished or ground to a fine edge, but were only 

 roughly chipped into shape, and were very rude 

 and irregular in contour. The Palaeolithic Age, 

 referring as the phrase does to a stage of culture, 

 and not to any chronological period, is some- 

 thing which has come and gone at very different 

 dates in different parts of the world. It may be 

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