220 THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN 



detailed in this paper. On the showing of Penck 

 we must go back, let us say, 200,000 years for 

 Mousterian Man. Yet Mousterian Man, as we 

 have seen, was a man in every sense of the word, 

 for there is no reason to suppose that he was in 

 any way less intelligent than we are to-day, 

 though he had, of course, infinitely less advantages 

 and many more difficulties to contend with. 

 We have to go back, let us say, some 10,000 years, 

 perhaps less, to arrive at Neolithic man, 10,000 

 years during which our present civilisation has 

 been evolved, perhaps not 6,000 since metals 

 came into use, or 3,000 or 4,000 since iron was 

 discovered. What was man doing during that 

 190,000 years that his progress from the skilfully 

 made implements of the Mousterian age should 

 have been so lamentably slow ? But we have 

 other authorities whose demands of time are 

 much more moderate, and we may take the most 

 moderate of them as a contrast to the theories of 

 Penck. G. F. Wright, as we have already seen, 

 thinks that the end of the glacial epoch was at 

 quite a recent date, and he adduces remarkable 

 evidence from the rate of erosion of the gorge of 

 Niagara. Like most waterfalls, Niagara is a post- 

 glacial object, as is evident from the fact that 

 " there is a buried preglacial channel leading 

 from Lake Erie to Lake Ontario, some distance 

 west of the present river " (Wright, G. F., p. 

 176). Now the gorge is at present about seven 

 miles in length, and is composed of strata, as to 

 which Wright remarks that " no geological con- 

 ditions could be more uniform and calculated to 



