64 ON THE LAND AND FRESH-WATER 



end, a mere affair of outposts; and for the real origin of man we 

 must go immeasurably farther back from that remarkahle time, into 

 the great pliocene or miocene age. To this period succeeded 

 another, of which we are as ignorant as ofthat which preceded it. 

 For as the mammoth, Irish elk and cave bear have disappeared 

 from the face of the earth, so did this early race vanish away, 

 leaving their weapons, their bones and their dwellings as the only 

 traces of their existence. Afterwards, at an enormous interval, 

 came another race, the Celts, in many points resembling their pre- 

 decessors, living in similar habitations, and unacquainted with the 

 use of metals, but more "highly civilized and possessed of more 

 highly finished weapons, and, as the Pfahlbauten of the Swiss 

 lakes shew, cultivating cereals, and to a certain degree, a pastoral 

 people." Pointing in the same direction, are Prof. Muller's the- 

 ories on the origin of language, and the well known speculations 

 of the Chevalier Bunsen. With the philological argument however 

 the naturalist has nothing to do. 



In an enquiry of. so much interest and consequence, it be 

 hoves us to be very cautions. Those naturalists who have 

 read Dr. Falconer's able papers on tertiary mammals will see 

 that, according to that careful observer, each subdivision of the 

 tertiary period is characterized by a group of mammals special 

 and peculiar to it. And, as a whole, we find that the higher 

 animals have a much more limited range in time than the lower 

 forms of life. It would seem that the higher the organism, the 

 less likely would it be to hold its own under trying physical vicis- 

 situdes, and altered conditions of whatever kind. Thus foramini- 

 ferse, identical with living species, occur in mesozoic strata ; and, 

 as we have seen, one at least of our Canadian land snails lived 

 through nearly the whole of the great tertiary period. The 

 gravels which furnished the worked flints of Amiens and Abbeville 

 are fresh-water deposits, not older, if as old, as the post-pliocene 

 deposits in Canada, known locally as the Leda clay and the 

 Saxicava sand. It is much to be wished that in the accounts 

 both of the flint-implement-making men of the valley of the Somme, 

 and of the inhabitants of the Swiss Phfahlbauten, we had more 

 careful lists of the larger mammals of the two periods. As to the 

 geological date of man's appearance on the earth, as far as I can 

 see, we have no positive evidence which would date man farther 

 back, at any rate, than the older part of the post-pliocene. 

 Thus I have endeavoured to jot down, in rather a cursory manner, 



