H. 'Woodward — Man and the Mammoth. 71 



Go back a century, where are our railroads, our telegraphs, our 

 steam-vessels, our rifled cannon ? 



Still further, and we have not our colonies, and the world is only 

 half-known. 



Further still, and we have not learned Christianity, and worship 

 idols ; we are ignorant, superstitious, and cruel. Still further, and 

 behold the savage depending on the chase, trusting to his instincts to 

 supply his wants. And now to ignorance, superstition, and cruelty, 

 he has added dirt; for he is not at all particular about his abode, 

 provided he be dry, warm, and his hunger appeased. His life was 

 not one constant state of alarm — indeed, he was happier in this re- 

 spect than his black representative of to-day. The Negro lives in a 

 stockaded village in terror. Why ? Because, although slavery is at 

 an end in America, it is not quite at an end elsewhere ; and the 

 cruel passions that ardent spirits and vice have engendered in the 

 slave-trading population of the coast, seek gratification in acts of 

 cruelty and violence, often of a far more terrible nature than any 

 pre-historic savage would have invented. 



There can be little doubt that the designation, " tlie noble savage," 

 belongs almost entirely to the past. If we except the New Zea- 

 landers, the savage races of to-day are probably, as a whole, less 

 civilised than the men of the French caves and the Swiss pile-works. 

 Witness the Andaman Islander, the Terra del Fuegian, and the 

 Australian native. 



The old Cave-men represented the population of the less-civilised 

 portions of the globe, as these aborigines do now in our own day ; 

 for there never was a time in the Earth's past history when a 

 uniform condition of things obtained, unless in pre-Silurian epochs. 



Faunas slowly but constantly migrate, a part becoming extinct, 

 some races improving, some remaining persistent. 



Peoples migrate — some are exterminated (witness the native races 

 dying out before the over- mastering efi'ects of a too-advanced white 

 civilization) — the remainder in part improve (being, as individuals, 

 capable of improvement) those which remain unchanged, do so be- 

 cause they are not exposed to the elements of change. 



There is little doubt that man has been upon the earth long 

 enough to have witnessed many physical changes, and even con- 

 siderable modifications in the climate of Europe. We can the more 

 readily accept this, because from the brief portion of the record of 

 our race embraced in the historic period, we know that many changes 

 in physical conditions have come to pass, and some, indeed, are even 

 now taking place around us. 



The duration of the Pre-historic period, as compared with the 

 historic, may best be conceived when it is borne in mind that very 

 old countries like India, whose history goes back further into the 

 past than any other, have still a lost history apparently far longer 

 than that handed down to us, evidenced by Megalithic and other 

 monuments of unknown antiquity ; and again, beyond that. Prof. 

 Blanford ; Messrs. King, Foote, Wynne, and other of the Geological 

 Surveyors, have obtained evidence of a still earlier and barbarous 



