NATURAL HISTORY OF MAN. 479 



For what is the position of Man in the scheme and series 

 thus described ? The answer is written in the same great 

 volume of nature ; the evidence negative indeed in part, 

 but not on that account less certain. While all anterior 

 conditions of animal life, as they have successively occurred, 

 are represented to us by innumerable vestiges and fossil 

 remains, no trace whatsoever is found of the human being 

 until we approach closely the epoch of his present existence. 

 Bones, shells, impressions of the most delicate structure, even 

 the passing footsteps of animals over a moist surface, all these 

 things have been wonderfully preserved to the inspection of 

 our own age. The most minute as well as the most gigantic 

 forms of the ancient animal world in its several periods are 

 familiar to our present knowledge. If in one spot the re- 

 mains have been too imperfect to allow the naturalist to 

 complete his delineation, such is the rich exuberance of this 

 fossil world that .he rarely fails to obtain what is wanting 

 from some contemporaneous or similar strata elsewhere on 

 the globe. Even the lacunce which still exist in the series of 

 zoological types are in progress of being filled up from the 

 same fertile source. Yet of Man, not one vestige is to be 

 found among any of these earlier creations of life on the 

 earth. A single bone, distinctly discovered in a well-marked 

 geological site, and attested as human by Cuvier or Owen, 

 would have decided the question. But none such of this date 

 have hitherto come to our hands. And the creation of Man 

 must be referred, if not to a period coincident with the last 

 changes in the surface of the globe, yet certainly, upon present 

 proof, to a time far later than those great revolutions which 

 have consolidated, raised, dislocated, or otherwise altered the 

 stratified rocks, at the successive periods of which geology 

 furnishes the record and the proof.* 



* The opinion here stated can hardly be thought discordant with the recent 

 discovery of flint implements (evidently the work of Man) in the Chalk gravel 



