BOS PRlMlGBNIUS. 85 



Continent from England to China, and apparently over Northern 

 America as well. Such a catastrophe occurring within the human 

 period may well be as Lenormant calls it in his " Beginnings of 

 History," the " most universal of all the traditions which concerns 

 the history of primitive humanity." Professor Prestwich, who is 

 one of our greatest English authorities on pleistocene geology, 

 places the close of the glacial period at a comparatively recent date, 

 and claims the authority of history with regard to the antiquity 

 of man. 



The above cases of Palaeolithic man are European, and far 

 removed from Western Asia, the historical centre of the human 

 race. Hceckel, whose views on evolution are very extreme, traces 

 the affiliation of man from the regions of the Persian Gulf, the 

 shallow parts of which were dry land in the human period at the 

 close of the Pleistocene age, but he places the primitive abode of 

 man further south, supposed to be submerged under the Indian 

 Ocean ; but of which our fellow-countryman Wallace, also a strong 

 evolutionist, shows there is no good evidence. The Biblical 

 account assigns the seat of man to the neighbourhood of these 

 very regions the southern part of the Babylonian plain and within 

 reach of a mountain district abounding with mineral products. It has 

 already been shown that Palaeolithic man had no domestic animals 

 ami was dependent upon wild game for his food ; the Bovidae he en- 

 countered were the aurochs or bison, and urus ; the former being 

 now only found in the Lithuanian forests. The latter is supposed 

 to be the ancestor of the degenerate white cattle with red-tipped 

 ears of Chillingworth Park. The Cambridge Museum contains a 

 skull of one of these gigantic oxen in which a flint is deeply sunk 

 into the frontal bone, perhaps inflicted in a deadly combat with a 

 brave Palaeolithic man. 



When we first meet Neolithic man we find him surrounded by a 

 group of animals differing in no respect from the present European 

 fauna. He excelled his predecessor in every respect except in art. 

 His relics have been met with in much greater abundance and over 

 a vastly wider area in Europe. The remains of Palaeolithic man 



