246 



THE CHAIN OF LIFE. 



shell-mounds, or the Swiss lake habitations, with Postdiluvian 

 and still existing tribes. 



After what has been already said, it will be unnecessary to 

 dwell upon the characteristics of the first race of men known 

 to us. They were rude and uncivilised, in so far as outward 

 appliances are concerned ; but they are confessedly altogether 

 men, and in no respect akin to apes, and their 

 volume of brain is rather greater than that of 

 the average European of to-day ; so that they 

 must have had quite as much natural sagacity 

 and capacity for culture, and, like the modern 

 and historic Turanian nations, they were pro- 

 bably superior to the average European in the 

 instinct for art and construction. Thus if we 

 suppose these men derived from apes by any 

 process of gradual change, we must look for 

 their brute ancestors, not in the Pliocene or 

 Miocene, but in the Eocene itself. This 

 causes us to recur to the doctrine of critical 

 periods, when many species were introduced 

 together, alternating with periods of decay and 

 extinction. Post-glacial man appears at the end 

 of a time of sifting and trial, a time in which 



Va vast number of species succumbed to great 

 physical reverses. No very great number of 

 species came in with him, and in the early 

 period of his history there was a decadence 



Fig. 191.— Bone Har- * . •,,,,.,., , 



poon(Paiae()cosmic), or destruction Cither by the diluvial cataclysm 

 Cavern. "^°^ OT gradually. Out of ninety-eight species of 

 mammals contemporary with early man in 

 Europe, forty-one are wholly or locally extinct, and none have 

 been introduced except those brought by man himself. Thus 

 man stands alone, the grand product of his period and a lord 

 of creation, for whom great preparatory changes were made, and 

 multitudes of lower animals swept away to make room for him. 



iA 



