GENERAL REVIEW OF THE QUESTION. 291 



vouring to reveal. "We accept the fact of this new endow- 

 ment ; shall we reject the continuity of progress through 

 which it has been evolved ? 



Such are some of the reasonings that suggest themselves 

 in reviewing the question of " Man's Place in the Geologi- 

 cal Record." In the first place, let it be treated without 

 bias or predilection, as a matter of natural history and 

 geology. In the second place, let us avail ourselves of 

 all the evidence that history, archaeology, geology, and 

 palaeontology can supply. And in the third place, let us, 

 as true geologists, be wary in assigning dates in years and 

 centuries, while the whole superstructure of our science is 

 founded on a relative and not upon an absolute chronology. 

 Guided by these methods, it would appear that man has 

 been an inhabitant of Southern and Western Europe from 

 a time immediately succeeding the close of the glacial 

 epoch, and that in these regions his antiquity dates, if not 

 from the very earliest, at least from the earlier of the post- 

 tertiary formations. How long ago this may have been in 

 years and centuries, there is no condescension on the part 

 of legitimate geology; but clearly it is far, very far, beyond 

 the limits of the ordinarily received chronology of the 

 human race. But ancient as this may be, the implement- 

 bearing gravels, the cave-earths, the peat-mosses, shell- 

 mounds, and lake-dwellings of Europe cannot be taken as a 

 measure of antiquity for Asia, from which, as everything 

 tends to show, the first races of Europe were derived by the 

 ordinary means of natural dispersion and selection. And 

 even were the first appearance of the white or Caucasian 

 race geologically determined in Asia, the first appearance of 

 the coloured varieties (Mongol, Negro, Malay, &c.), each in 

 its own proper headquarters, would still remain a problem 

 of antecedent date, requiring similar methods of research, 



