294 THEORY OF THE EARTH. 



where covers our large plains, fills our caverns, 

 and chokes up the fissures in many of our rocks. 

 They incontestibly formed the population of the 

 continents, at the epoch of the great catastrophe 

 which has destroyed their races, and which has 

 prepared the soil, on which the animals of the 

 present day subsist. 



Whatever resemblance certain of these species 

 bear to those of our days, it cannot be disput- 

 ed that the general mass of this population had a 

 very different character, and that the greater part 

 of the races which composed it have been utterly 

 destroyed. 



What astonishes us is, that, among all these 

 mammifera, the greater number of which have 

 their congeners at the present day in the warm 

 parts of the globe, there has not been a single 

 quadrumanous animal, that there has not been 

 collected a single bone or a single tooth of an ape 

 or monkey, not so much even as a bone or a tooth 

 belonging to an extinct species of these animals. 



Nor is there any trace of man. All the bones 

 of our species that have been found along with 

 those of which we have been speaking, have oc- 

 curred accidentally *, and their number besides is 



* See in the Reliquice Diluviance of Mr Buckland the ac- 

 count of the skeleton of a woman found in the cave of Pa- 



