440 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



anticipate his conclusions, and accept or refute them as the 

 case may be. 



The Andes and the Himalayas are the highest mountains in 

 the world, and therefore are presumably the most recent. Their 

 sudden upheaval may almost have shaken the world, if not to 

 its centre, at least to its circumference, and may have caused 

 the catastrophe handed down to us in the legends of every nation 

 as the " Great Flood." This deluge may have destroyed the 

 monster mammals which became extinct at the end of the 

 Pleistocene Age, and may have nearly exterminated Palaeolithic 

 Man ; but there may, and there must have been, a Post-Pliocene, 

 and probably a Prae-Pliocene, Glacial Ei)oeh before the Flood. 

 To say nothing of the impossibility of accounting for the present 

 geographical distribution of mammals and birds^ tJr-any other im^/ 

 theory, the distribution of human remains demands a Glacial 

 Epoch as well as a Great Deluge. If the latter destroyed 

 Palaeolithic Man, what becomes of the overwhelming evidence 

 in support of the theory that at least nine-tenths of the Palaeo- 

 lithic flint implements are Post- Glacial ? The evidence clearly 

 points to the fact that Palaeolithic Man lived for the most part 

 after the Post-Pliocene Glacial Epoch, and before the Pleistocene 

 Deluge, a period which may have lasted forty thousand years. 



Mr. Howorth's most interesting and instructive book shows 

 pretty conclusively that the uniformity of geological events has 

 been now and again broken by catastrophes of enormous 

 magnitude, and to this extent the evidence which he has 

 collected is valuable. But philosophers are prone to jump from 

 one extreme to the other, and Mr. Howorth is apparently no 

 exception to the rule. If the disciples of Lyell have erred in 

 carrying too far the theory of Uniformity, and have tried to 

 twist every fact in conformity with it, Mr. Howorth errs in not 

 carrying it far enough, and would have us account for every- 

 thing by his theory of a catastrophe. We willingly accept his 

 theory of a Great Deluge, but we cannot forego our belief in 

 Glacial Epochs. The evidence of the one is as indelibly 

 imprinted on the universe as that of the other, and, unless he 

 can bring forward in his promised second volume some facts 

 which are inconsistent with this belief, we must continue to place 

 credence in both. 



