CHAPTER VI 



THE PLEISTOCENE OF EUROPE, NORTH AFRICA, AND NORTH 



AMERICA 



We have seen that the Upper Tertiary or Phocene closes with a world 

 rich with life, a world replete with Asiatic and African influence. The 

 Tertiary is followed by the Quaternary : 



c.nozoic={?-™™a- 



The grand divisions of the Quaternary in the New and Old Worlds are 

 the same; namely, beginning with the Pleistocene and closing with the 

 Holocene, 



II. Holocene, or Recent. Mammals of prehistoric times. Do- 

 mestication. 

 I. Pleistocene, or Glacial. 



3. Post-Glacial. Mammals of existing species. Migrations and 



extinctions. 

 2. Glacial. Period of successive glacial advances and retreats. 



Mammals of extinct and existing species conmiingled. 

 1. Preglacial. Period of the incipient lowering of temperature 

 and modification of animal and plant life. 



2 



In the Pleistocene period the fullness and precision of European in- 

 vestigation are in the strongest contrast to the preliminary results of Ameri- 

 can work, and in no other period may we anticipate more weighty induc- 

 tions from correlation between the history of the Old and New Worlds. 

 It is true that the Pleistocene history of Europe is still in a formative 

 stage, but it is absolutely clear that a final and positive time scale and 

 subdivision of the early Age of Man are not far distant, and that the vast 

 labors of European geologists, botanists, zoologists, palaeontologists, and 

 anthropologists will finally be rewarded v/ith a harmonious theory of all 

 the phenomena of the Quaternary epoch. 



Combined attack by geological and biological methods has nowhere 

 produced more brilliant results. The unaided testimony of the rocks and 

 soils fails to tell us of the successive advances and retreats of the ice; but 

 where, owing to the obliteration of surface deposits, geology is in confusion, 

 the traces of plant and animal life serve both biology and meteorology 

 like vast thermometers of the past, actually recording within a few degrees 



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