286 MAN'S PLACE IN THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD. 



conclusion. Before we can arrive at the absolute anti- 

 quity of man, or of his real place in the Geological Eecord, 

 we must know more of the Asiatic and African Post-ter- 

 tiaries, and more of the correlation of these to the Post- 

 tertiary accumulations of Europe. We must also learn to 

 deal with man as with other fossil genera, and instead of 

 seeking for mere variations in skull and facial angle, we 

 must be prepared to admit variations that amount to true 

 specific distinctions. All animals in the history of the 

 past, if they have existed long enough, break into varieties 

 and species ; and it will be a proof of man's comparative 

 recentness, if we can discover no wider difference than mere 

 varieties ; but, on the contrary, it will be evidence of his 

 higher antiquity, if zoologists can show that any variation, 

 past or existing, is so great as to entitle it to be ranked 

 as a specific distinction. Man may be the sole species of a 

 single genus, but in this particular zoologists have departed 

 from the true Baconian method, and dealt with man as if 

 he did not belong to the same category of vitality with 

 which it is the duty of their science to deal ; and not till 

 they have learned to treat him from a natural-history point 

 of view, can we hope to receive from them anything like 

 truly philosophical opinion. 



As the matter stands at present, we have evidence of 

 man's occupancy in Europe during the formation of the 

 earlier Post-tertiaries, and during the period when the rein- 

 deer, musk-ox, hairy elephant, and woolly rhinoceros 

 roamed over its surface. The existence of these animals in 

 Western Europe betokens a somewhat boreal climate, and 

 in all likelihood man gradually took possession of the 

 continent as the climate began to improve on the gradual 

 recession of the glacial epoch. Arranging the Post-tertiary 

 system, as has been proposed, into Mammothian, Rein- 

 deer, and Bovine stages, we find man occurring at least 



