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stone implements associated with worked horns of the 

 great Irish elk and reindeer, and with bones of the musk- 

 ox, mammoth, and woolly-haired rhinoceros, and these in 

 silts and drifts that indicate great physical changes in the 

 geography of Europe, then we may rest assured that these 

 monuments are pre-historic and of unknown antiquity. We 

 have no indication in history that the mammoth, rhinoceros, 

 or Irish deer were inhabitants of Southern and Western 

 Europe ; nothing either in history or tradition that points 

 to the time when the reindeer and musk-ox roamed in the 

 latitudes of France and England. It is true that natural 

 events are rarely noticed in ancient history, and especially 

 those of slow and gradual occurrence like the facts of geo- 

 logy; still it maybe safely asserted that during the historic 

 period none of the animals above referred to were inhabi- 

 tants of the southern and western portions of our continent. 

 Whatever the date of these stone implements, and their 

 associated mammoth and rhinoceros remains, they clearly 

 belong to pre-historic times; and the question is thus 

 narrowed to the relative antiquities of certain events which 

 occurred far beyond the reach of the oldest history and 

 the remotest traditions. 



In dealing with pre-historic monuments, we may adopt 

 either the methods of the archaeologist, who founds chiefly 

 on the comparative rudeness and simplicity of the relics, or 

 those of the geologist, who looks mainly to the superposi- 

 tion of the beds in which the relics occur, or those of the 

 palaeontologist, who argues from the specific differences of 

 the flora and fauna ; or we may adopt a mixed method, and 

 reason from all that archeology, geology, and palaeontology 

 supply. Adopting this latter plan, we reason from the 

 lake-silts, peat-mosses, and deltic deposits containing stone 

 implements and tree-canoes, associated with the bones of 

 extinct varieties of the horse and ox, back to similar depo- 



