290 THE STORY OP TEIE EARTH AND MAN. 



Post-glacial animals, which must have lived during 

 the condition of our continents above referred to. If 

 these inferences are well founded, not only did man 

 exist at this time, but man not even varietally distinct 

 from modern European races. But if man really 

 appeared in Europe in the Post-glacial era, he was 

 destined to be exposed to one great natural vicissi- 

 tude before his permanent establishment in the world. 

 The land had reached its maximum elevation, but its 

 foundations, " standing in the water and out of the 

 water," were not yet securely settled, and it had to 

 take one more plunge-bath before attaining its 

 modern fixity. This seems to have been a com- 

 paratively rapid subsidence and re-elevation, leaving 

 but slender traces of its occurrence, but changing to 

 some extent the levels of the continents, and failing 

 to restore them fully to their former elevation, so that 

 large areas of the lower grounds still remained under 

 the sea. If, as the greater number of geologists now 

 believe, man was then on the earth, it is not im- 

 possible that this constituted the deluge recorded in 

 that remarkable " log book " of Noah preserved to us 

 in Genesis, and of which the memory remains in the 

 traditions of most ancient nations. This is at least 

 the geological deluge which separates the Post-glacial 

 period from the Modern, and the earlier from the 

 later pre-historic period of the archasologists.* 



* I have long thought that the narrative in Gen. vii. and 

 viii. can be understood only on the supposition that it is a 

 contemporary journal or log of an eye-witness incorporated by 



