GOSSIP ON ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 83 



then existed, and roamed the forest now buried beneath the 

 waters. But had remains of man been found there, the chronolo- 

 gical record would not have been true. They have not been found, 

 therefore positive evidence against that record is wanting, and so 

 far the negative evidence proves its truth. Yet Sir Charles Lyell 

 writes, with reference to the time of the Norwich crag : — 



" Neither need we despair* of one day meeting with the signs of 

 man's existence in the forest bed, or in the next overlying strata, on the 

 ground of any uncongeniality in the climate, or incongruity in the state 

 of the animate creation with the well-being of our species. For the 

 present Ave must be content to icait, and consider that we have made no 

 investigations which entitle us to wonder that the bones or stone weapons 

 of the era of the elephas meridionalis have failed to come to light. If 

 any such lie hid in those strata, and should hereafter be revealed to us, 

 they would carry hack the antiquity of inan to a distance of time probably 

 more than tivice as great as that ivhich separates our era from that of the 

 most ancient of the tool-hearing gravels yet discovered in Picardy or else- 

 lohere. But even then the reader will perceive that the age of man, 

 though pre-glacial, would be so modern in the great geological calender, 

 that he would scarcely date so far back as the commencement of the 

 post-pliocene period." 



From this instance, which will show the scepticism, or if you 

 will the positive belief, of the talented new school of geologic 

 philosophy, you will gather the fact, that there are no evidences of 

 man's existence upon the earth, in any formation or deposit, pre- 

 vious to the glacial period, nor have any traces of his existence that 

 may be depended on been discovered in Europe until a long time 

 after its close. 



When scepticism is carried beyond the historical, chronological, 

 and geological evidence, it need not surprise, that conclusions based 

 on such scepticism are disputed. Sir Charles Lyell states in his 

 book, that M. Desnoyers, an observer equally well versed in 

 geology and archaeology, had disputed the conclusion arrived at by 

 other geologists (M. Tournal and Christol), that the fossil rhinoce- 

 ros, hyena, bear, and other lost species, had once been inhabitants 

 of France contemporaneously with man. "The flint hatchets and 

 arrow-heads," he said, " and the pointed bones and coarse pottery 

 of many French and English caves, agree precisely in character 

 with those found in the tumuli and under the dolmens (rude altars 

 of unhewn stone) of the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, Britain, and 



Germany. The human bones, therefore, in the caves, which are 



^ ^ 



* The italics are mine. — W. G. 



