ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 89 



Eocene. The Miocene includes formations in -which there are living; ffenera 

 of mammals, but no species which survive to the present time. The Pliocene 

 and Pleistocene show living species, thouf^h in the former these arc very few 

 and exceptional, while in the latter they become the majority. 



"With regard to the geological antiquity of man, no geologist expects to 

 find any human remains in beds older than the Tertiary, because in the older 

 periods the conditions of the world do not seem to have been suitable to 

 man, and because in these periods no animals nearly akin to man are known. 

 On entering into the Eocene Tertiary we fail in like manner to find any 

 human remains ; and we do not expect to find any, because no living species 

 and scarcely any living genera of mammals are known in the Eocene ; nor 

 do we find in it remains of any of the creatures, as the anthropoid apes for 

 instance, most nearly allied to man. In the Miocene the case is somewhat 

 diflerent. Here we have living genera at least, and we have large species of 

 apes ; but no relics of man have been discovered, if we except some splinters 

 of flint found in beds of this age at Thenay in France, and a notched rib- 

 bone. Supposing these objects to have been chipped or notched by animals, 

 which is rendered very unlikely by the results of the most recent investiga- 

 tions, the question remains, was this done by man ? The probability on 

 general gronnds of the existence of men at this period is so small, that 

 Gaudry and Dawkins, two of the best authorities,* prefer to suppose that 

 the artificer was one of the anthropoid apes of the period. It is true that 

 no apes are known to do such work now ; but then other animals, as beavers 

 and birds, are artificers, and some extinct animals possessed higher powers 

 than their modern representatives. But if there were Miocene apes which 

 chipped flints and cut bones, this would, either on the hypothesis of evolu- 

 tion or that of creation by law, render the occurrence of man still less likely 

 than if there were no such apes. For these reasons neither Dawkins nor 

 Gaudry, nor indeed any geologists of authority in the Tertiary fauna, believe 

 in Miocene man. 



" In the Pliocene, as Dawkins points out, though the facies of the 

 mammalian fauna of Europe becomes more modern, and a few modern species 

 occur, the climate becomes colder, and in consequence the apes disappear, so 

 that the chances of finding fossil men are lessened rather than increased, in 

 so far as the temperate regions are concerned. In Italy, however, Capellini 

 has described a skull, an implement, and a notched bone, supposed to have 

 come from Pliocene beds, and which are preserved in the Museum of 

 Florence. They are all, however, of so recent types that it is in every way 

 likely they have become mixed with the Pliocene stuS' by some slip of the 

 ground. As the writer has elsewhere pointed outt similar and apparently 

 fatal objections apply to the skull and implements alleged to have been 

 found in Pliocene gravels in California. Dawkins further informs us that in 

 the Italian Pliocene beds supposed to hold remains of man, of twenty-one 

 mammalia whose bones occur, all are extinct species except possibly one, a 

 hippopotamus. This of course renders very unlikely in a geological point of 

 view the occurrence of human remains in these beds, and up to this time no 

 such discovery has been certainly established. 



" In the Pleistocene deposits of Europe — and this applies also to America — 

 we for the first time find a predominance of recent species of land animals. 

 Here, therefore, we may look with some hope for remains of man and his 

 works, and here, accordingly, in the later Pleistocene or early Modern, they 

 are actually found. When we speak, however, of Pleistocene man, there 

 arise questions as to the classification of the deposits, which it seems to the 



* Les Erichauiements du Monde Animal : Early Man in Europe. 

 t Fossil Mm, 1880, 



