310 THE STORY OF THE EARTH AND MAN. 



occupying long ages at the slow rate at which some 

 parts of our continents are now rising or sinking.* 



Such are the glimpses, obscure though stimulating 

 to the imagination, which geology can give of the cir- 

 cumstances attending the appearance of man in Western 

 Europe. How far we are from being able to account 

 for his origin, or to give its circumstances and relative 

 dates for the whole world, the reader will readily 

 understand. Still it is something to know that there 

 is an intelligible meeting-place of the later geological 

 ages and the age of man, and that it is one inviting to 

 many and hopeful researches. It is curious also to find 

 that the few monuments disinterred by geology, the 

 antediluvian record of Holy Scripture, and the golden 

 age of heathen tradition, seem alike to point to 

 similar physical conditions, and to that simple state 

 of the arts of life in which " gold and wampum 

 and flint stones " f constituted the chief material 

 treasures of the earliest tribes of men. They also 

 point to the immeasurable elevation, then as now, of 

 man over his brute rivals for the dominion of the 

 earth. To the naturalist this subject opens up most 

 inviting yet most difficult paths of research, to be 



* Another element in this is also the question raised by 

 Dawkins, Geikie, and others as to subdivisions of the Post- 

 glacial period and intermissions of the Glacial cold. Mr. Pen- 

 ^elly thinks that the Breccia of Kent's Cave may be pre- 

 glacial or inter-glacial, but it is perhaps rather early Post- 

 glacial. 



f So I read the "gold, bedolah, and shoham " of the descrip- 

 tion of Eden in Genesis ii. the oldest literary record of the 

 stone age. 



