NEW SCIENCE OF PALEONTOLOGY 



the evidence as to man's antiquity before presented 

 was suggestive merely, here at last was demonstration ; 

 for the cave-dwelling man could not well have drawn 

 the picture of the mammoth unless he had seen that 

 animal, and to admit that man and the mammoth had 

 been contemporaries was to concede the entire case. 

 So soon, therefore, as the full import of this most in- 

 structive work of art came to be realized, scepticism as 

 to man's antiquity was silenced for all time to come. 



In the generation that has elapsed since the first 

 drawing of the cave-dweller artist was discovered, evi- 

 dences of the wide-spread existence of man in an early 

 epoch have multiplied indefinitely, and to-day the 

 paleontologist traces the history of our race back be- 

 yond the iron and bronze ages, through a neolithic or 

 polished-stone age, to a paleolithic or rough-stone age, 

 with confidence born of unequivocal knowledge. And 

 he looks confidently to the future explorer of the earth's 

 fossil records to extend the history back into vastly 

 more remote epochs, for it is little doubted that paleo- 

 lithic man, the most ancient of our recognized progen- 

 itors, is a modern compared to those generations that 

 represented the real childhood of our race. 



THE FOSSIL-BEDS OF AMERICA 



Coincidently with the discovery of these highly sug- 

 gestive pages of the geologic story, other still more in- 

 structive chapters were being brought to light in Amer- 

 ica. It was found that in the Rocky Mountain region, 

 in strata found in ancient lake beds, records of the 

 tertiary period, or age of mammals, had been made and 

 preserved with fulness not approached in any other re,- 



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