Primitive Man. 51 



the musk sheep, reindeer, arctic fox and chamois, showing 

 that successive cold waves had forced, at one epoch, 

 the arctic fauna far south of their present locality, and 

 again that this was followed by a rise in temperature which 

 permitted the animals of tropical zones to exist much far- 

 ther north than at present. 



It has been shown that men, prior to the Glacial Epoch, 

 or savages perhaps rather, of probably an extremely low grade 

 of development, without pottery, possibly in the earliest 

 periods unacquainted with lire, existed contemporaneous- 

 ly with a fossil species of the rhinoceros, which at some 

 warm period lived in the vicinity of London and was distrib- 

 uted extensively over Xorthern Europe. They were anterior 

 in time, in France and Britain at least, to the musk sheep 

 and the marmot, animals of the glacial and pre-glacial epochs. 

 The flint implements of these tribes are of the roughest 

 kind. It is claimed by some that these races were supplanted 

 by the subsequent Cave Men ; by others that they represent 

 only an earlier and more primitive condition of the latter. 

 The place of origin of Eiver-Drift man is unknown of 

 course, and to what periods immensely remote his ancestry 

 extended it is still less possible even to approximate. He 

 is simply the earliest of our own species whose existence is 

 traceable, and, if belonging to essentially a distinct race from 

 his successors, he has vanished into the night of the past, with 

 only the most rudely chipped flints left to reveal even the 

 fact of his having been u^pon the earth. 



The result of the gradual refrigeration of the IS"orthern 

 Hemisphere was the Glacial Period of the Pleistocene, and 

 the overlaying of all the countries now known as Finland 

 and Northern Russia, Scandinavia and Scotland, and the 

 American Continent as far south as the latitude of Phila- 

 delphia, Avith a sheet of ice many hundreds of feet in thick- 

 ness, sending forth immense glaciers still farther south- 

 ward. The occurrence of the Glacial Period is so well 

 established as to have become one of the commonplaces of 

 Geology. The proofs from the striation of rocks in the 

 northerly and central portions of Asia, Europe and Amer- 

 ica, caused by the friction upon rock surfaces of masses of 

 ice in motion, and now still being produced by glacial action 

 in the Alps and elsewhere; the fact of old river-beds 

 existing at the foot of mountains, which have undoubtedly, 

 in past ages, been the scene of glacial movement, and caused 



