XCVll 



Pleiocene period (^Elepkas primiffenius, ursus spelceu^, &c.), and of near- 

 ly if not quite the oldest known age of flint and bone implements of hu- 

 man workmanship. Not that this evidence was necessary to establish the 

 existence of man in that age; for that fact was already conclusively proved 

 by the flint, or stone, and bone implements, of unquestionable human 

 wo'kmanship, previously found in caves, and still older deposits in both 

 France and England. Nor, indeed, that no other human bones contem- 

 porary wiih the same extinct animals were known before; for the Engis 

 skulls found by Dr. Schmerling, and the Neanderthal skull described by Dr« 

 Fuhlrott, had long ago furnished very satisfactory evidence of that fact, 

 though at the time of their discovery geologists were not prepared to 

 admit the pot-sibility of such facts being true. And the fossil jaw-bone 

 reported to have been found with the oldest flint implements of the valley 

 of the Somme, in France, might be taken as another instance, if skillful 

 geologihts and especially so able an observer as Mr. John Evans, the dis- 

 tinguished English geologist, had not cast a slur upon it as a possible 

 case of imposition, or as not having been seen in situ by any scientific 

 geologist. Probably in such a matter the oath of a dozen ordinary work- 

 men would not be taken as any proof of the fact; but here, now, is an 

 instance which it is not possible for any rational man to dispute. 



Secondly, it is significant in being six feet in length, dolicho-cephalic, 

 and not negroid in type, and in being peculiar in its orbital cavities. So 

 far as can be judged from the engraving, it resembles somewhat the Nean- 

 derthal skull, and is even suggestive of the boat-shaped skulls of the older 

 English barrows. But since the age is fixed as that of the Post-Pleiocene 

 animals, going back, within a few strata of the end of the Pleiocene period — 

 to a period so vastly femote in time as scarcely to admit of any compari 

 son with ethnological data in respect of the distribution of races or colors, 

 or any possible classification, in point of race or color, with the compara- 

 tively modern men of the present science of Ethnology — we are carried 

 bick far beyond the category of nations ahd Ethnology proper, and are 

 taken into the purely zoological province of Anthropology. 



Nevertheless, in view of all that is known upon the question, it would 

 seem as yet to be highly probable that these oldest men of Europe pro- 

 ceeded, originally, from the Southeastern Asiatic centre of human origins, 

 the seat of the Asiatic Simiadae and the home of the reddish-yellow Orang, 

 as all the later migrations into Europe certainly did. whether from High 

 Asia or from the Peninsula of Hindustan, including perhaps the negroes 

 of Afri<;a ; for it is possible that the negroes came into Africa along the 

 coasts of Hindustan, Beloochistan, and Southern Arabia, as they are 

 known to have reached the ancient Colchis, through the valley of the 

 Euphrates, at a comparatively recent period; but it is altogether more 

 probable that they came into Africa by continuous land or islands which 

 have been sunk in the Indian Ocean since the beginning of the human 

 period. The geological fact of such sinking of Southeastern Asia where- 

 by a part of the continent became islands, since the Tertiary period, is 

 well established. The affinities of the native languages of Madagascar 



iii^-G 



