558 INTEK-GLACIAL AMERICAN MAN. 



remains, to the very threshold of that prehistoric peiiod which forras 

 the debatable land between geological and historical epochs. Indeed, 

 not the least significant fact in reference to the remarkable dis- 

 closures of recent years, is that some of the most characteristic drift 

 implements — such as the spear-head found alongside of a fossil ele- 

 phant's tooth in the vicinity of Gray's Inn Lane, London ; or the 

 large flint implements of the same type obtained from the drift of 

 the Waveney Valley, at Hoxne in Surrey, underlying similar fossil 

 remains, — had been brought under the notice of archseologists, and 

 deposited in the British Museum, upwards of a century before the 

 idea of the contemporaneous existence of man and the mammals of 

 the drift found any favour. 



The conception of the comprehensiveness even of historical an- 

 tiquity was long trammelled in Europe by a too exclusive devotion 

 to Greek and Roman remains; but the historical relations of the 

 American continent with the Old World are so recent, that for it 

 the fifteenth century is the historic dawn; and anything dating 

 before the landing of Columbus has seemed to be inconceivably 

 ancient. Hence antiquarian speculations and historical research 

 have been almost exclusively occupied on very modern remains ; 

 and the supreme triumph long aimed at has been to associate the 

 hieroglyphics and sculptures of Central America, and the architec- 

 tural monuments of Mexico and Peru, with those of ancient Egypt. 

 But in all that relates to the history of man in the ISTew World, 

 we have to reserve ourselves for further disclosures. There are 

 languages of living tribes of which neither vocabulary nor grammar 

 has yet been constructed. There are nations of whose physical 

 aspect we scarcely know anything ; and areas where it is a moot 

 point even now, whether the ancient civilization of Central America 

 may not be still a living thing. The palseolithic disclosures of the 

 French drift belong to our own day ; and though the researches of 

 the Rev. Mr. MacEnery in the famous Kent's Hole cavern, had 

 fully half a century ago brought to light true palseolithic flint 

 implements in the same red loam which contained bones of the 

 mammoth, tichorine rhinoceros, cave-bear, and other extinct mam- 

 malia, it is only now that the true significance of the disclosures of 

 the ossiferous caves of England is being recognized. America was 

 indeed little behind Europe in the earlier stages of cavern research. 

 It is upwards of forty years since discoveries in the ossiferous caves 



