[10] 



eluded a female skull of very inferior type, having 

 enormously thick frontal bone and a low, narrow roof, 

 slanting from before backwards. A very good specimen of 

 human fossil is that known as the " Denise Fossil Man," 

 comprising the remains of more than one skeleton found 

 in a volcanic breccia near Le Puy-en-Velay, in Central 

 France. These bones have been very carefully examined 

 by the members of the French Scientific Congress, as 

 also the deposit in which they were found, and the 

 opinion arrived at is that the fossils are genuine and their 

 age early Pleistocene. Another most interesting specimen- 

 of ancient human remains is the skeleton found buried 

 under four Cypress forests, superimposed one upon the 

 other, in the delta of the Mississippi, near New Orleans, 

 at a depth of sixteen feet. Dr. Dowler ascribes to this 

 skeleton an antiquity of at least 50,000 years, reckoning 

 by the minimum length of time that must have elapsed 

 during the formation of the deposits found and the sink- 

 ing of the four successive forest beds. In another part 

 of the same delta, near Natchez, a human bone, os- 

 innominatum, accompanied by bones of the mastodon 

 and megalonyx, was washed out of what is believed to be 

 a still more ancient alluvial deposit. Dr. Dickeson, in 

 whose possession the said bone is now, states that it 

 was buried at a depth of thirty feet, and geologists agree 

 that its date is very early, some maintaining that it is 

 probably of a higher antiquity than any yet discovered. 



From these discoveries it is abundantly evident that 

 man existed on the earth contemporaneously with the 

 mastodon and other extinct mammals belonging to the 

 Pleiocene and early Pleistocene eras. There are, how- 

 ever, people who stoutly deny that this can be so at 

 any rate, as regards Northern and Central Europe and 

 who rank the discoveries at Moulin Quignon, Engis, 

 Kent's Cavern, etc., with late Pleistocene remains.. 

 They maintain that the beds in which these relics were 

 found could not have been of Pleiocene or early Pleis- 

 tocene formation, inasmuch as they lie above the till and 

 boulder-clay which form the glacial deposits of the time 

 when Europe was an Arctic region that is to say, of 

 late Pleistocene times. Therefore, they say, man's 

 earliest existence in Europe was post-glacial cr late 



