HIS FIRST APPEARANCE IN EUROPE. 287 



during a portion of the Mammothian stage, and thus he- 

 speaking for him a vast and venerahle antiquity unex- 

 pressed in years, no douht, hut not on that account the 

 less certain in its existence and duration. But while man's 

 place in the geological record "belongs to the earlier Post- 

 tertiaries in Europe, older varieties of his race may have 

 existed for untold ages in the regions of Asia and Africa, 

 from which in all likelihood the European "branches were 

 descended.* On the advent of the glacial epoch over the 

 latitudes of Europe, the pre-glacial animals seem to have 

 receded to southern and more genial climates, and again on 

 its departure they appear, in some of their species, to have 

 returned to the old areas. It was during this post-glacial 

 return that man seems to have made his first appearance in 

 Europe a fisher and hunter, forming rude stone imple- 

 ments, and, so far as geology has discovered, very low in 

 the scale of civilisation. But while Mammothian man was 

 straggling along the river -hanks of Europe for a scanty 

 subsistence, other families of his race were in all proha- 



* " It is not under the hard conditions of the glacial epoch in Europe," 

 says Dr Falconer, " that the earliest relics of the human race upon the 

 globe are to be sought. Like the Esquimaux, Tchukche, and Samoyeds 

 on the shores of the Icy Sea at the present day, man must have been 

 then and there an emigrant placed under circumstances of rigorous and 

 uncertain existence, unfavourable to the struggle of life and to the main- 

 tenance and spread of the species. It is rather in the great alluvial 

 valleys of tropical or sub-tropical rivers, like the Ganges, the Irrawaddy, 

 and the Nile, where we may expect to detect the vestiges of his earliest 

 abode. It is there where the necessaries of life are produced by nature 

 in the greatest variety and profusion, and obtained with the smallest 

 effort there where climate exacts the least protection against the 

 vicissitudes of the weather and there where the lower animals which 

 approach man nearest now exist, and where fossil remains turn up in 

 greatest variety and abundance. The earliest date to which man has as 

 yet been traced back in Europe, is probably but as yesterday in compa- 

 rison with the epoch at which he made his appearance in more favoured 

 regions." On the asserted occurrence of human bones in the ancient flu- 

 viatile deposits of the Nile and Ganges Quarterly Journal of Geology, 

 1865. 



