100 DARWINIANA. 



the appreciation of tlieir bearings upon most interest- 

 ing questions, belong to tbe present time. To complete 

 the connection of these primitive people with the 

 fossil ages, the French geologists, we are told, have 

 now " found these axes in Picardj associated with re- 

 mains of .Elejyhas jp7nmigenius^ Rhinoceros tichoj'hi- 

 nuSy EqiiiLS fossilis^ and an extinct species of Bos^ ^ 

 In plain language, these workers in flint lived in the 

 time of the mammoth, of a rhinoceros now extinct, and 

 along with horses and cattle unlike any now existing 

 — specifically different, as naturalists say, from those 

 with which man is now associated. Their connection 

 with existing human races may perhaps be traced 

 through the intervening people of the stone age, who 

 were succeeded by the people of the bronze age, and 

 these by workers in iron.'' I^ow, various evidence 

 carries back the existence of many of the present low- 

 er species of animals, and probably of a larger nimiber 

 of plants, to the same drift period. All agree that 

 this was very many thousand years ago. Agassiz tells 

 us that the same species of polyps which are now 

 building coral walls around the present peninsula of 

 Florida actually made that peninsula, and have been 

 building there for many thousand centuries. 



5. The overlapping of existing and extinct species, 

 and the seemingly gradual transition of the life of the 

 drift period into that of the present, may be turned to 



1 See " Correspondence of M. Nickles," in American Journal of Sci- 

 ence and Arts, for March, 1860. 



2 See Morlot, " Some General Views on Archaeology," in American 

 Journal of Science and Arts, for January, 1860, translated from " Bul- 

 letin de la Society Vaudoise," 1859. 



