358 JReviews — SouthaH's JEpoch of the Mammoth. 



great antiquity. Say, with Worsaae, about 3000 years as the age 

 of the Trojan war, at the utmost 2000 years e.g., which is about the 

 date of the closing effects of the Glacial Period. In order to dispose 

 of the prima facie evidence for great antiquity yielded by the bone- 

 caves, with their undoubted association of man and mammoth, under 

 several successive floors of stalagmite. Dr. Southall undertakes to 

 show from the researches of the zoologists, that the mammoth 

 lived in the South of France, with the reindeer, in comparatively 

 recent times, and therefore he concludes that this was so in England, 

 and that the rate of deposit of stalagmite, and the rapid change of 

 levels, and alteration in physical geography, all occurred within a 

 few thousand years. The evidence as lo this is pretty fully referred to, 

 and though the author breaks a lance with Prof. Boyd Dawkins, he 

 nevertheless accepts many of the facts and frequently the opinions of 

 such experts. 



The argument of the present work is that the caves of Neolithic 

 age contain bones of the reindeer and cave-bear; these were, es- 

 pecially in Southern Europe, the contemporaries of the mammoth and 

 rhinoceros ; the latter cannot therefore be far removed from the Neo- 

 lithic date. The assumed recent imbedding of the great mammal 

 carcases in Siberia and Ohio is adduced as rendering it "not only pro- 

 bable, but almost certain, that the mammoth, the mastodon, the mega- 

 therium, and the tichorhine rhinoceros, were living at a recent date." 



" We have thus fulfilled our promise, and proved the recent 

 existence of the so-called PalEeolithic fauna. The cave-horse, the 

 cave-bear, the cave-lion, the cave-hygena, are still living ; the cave- 

 lion is mentioned historically in Europe a few centuries before our 

 era ; wild horses scoured the plains of Eussia a few centuries ago ; 

 the urus survived to the sixteenth century; the aurochs still survives; 

 the reindeer is traced down to the beginning of our era, and even to 

 the twelfth century ; the great elk survived equally as late ; the 

 mastodon and the mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros, are found 

 under circumstances that imply their existence a few thousand years 

 ago." 



Proceeding from this to the consideration of the drift-implements 

 (the real difficulty in the whole case). Dr. Southall argues that the 

 peat of the Somme rests immediately on the implement gravels, 

 and that in the caves, especially those of Belgium, the Neolithic also 

 rests immediately on the Palaeolithic, so that there is proof of 

 suddenness and absence of interval between the two, in fact, no gap. 

 He offers the following explanation of the gravels : — 



"But how then shall we explain the occurrence of the implement- 

 bearing gravels, eighty feet or more above the present level of the 

 river ? Our opinion is, that when those gravels were deposited, the 

 valley was filled by water from bluff to bluff — a body of water one 

 or two miles at least in breadth, and 100 or 150 feet deep. It was 

 the Paleolithic Flood, an event now well recognized by geologists. 

 It is a secondary question whether this flood was occasioned by an 

 inflow of the sea, or by the Pluvial Period of Mr. Tylor. That there 

 was such a flood, covering no inconsiderable area in Belgium, in 



