120 MAN: 



for the Irisli deer, so we can have none for the human 

 remains, and can only consider their antiquity in 

 relation to other geological events that took place 

 before or came after them. Or let us take Hercula- 

 neum and Pompeii, which in a certain sense belong to 

 the domaia of geology. Had there been no record of 

 the entombment of these cities, we could only, by a 

 comparison of their works of art, have arrived at an 

 approximation of the time when they were over- 

 whelmed; and had these remains borne no resem- 

 blance to anything of Eoman, Greek, Etruscan, 

 Phoenician, or Egyptian art, then we must have 

 assigned to them a date prior to any of these nation- 

 alities, and consequently of unknown antiquity. Or 

 further, if shells now living in the Greenland seas be 

 found occurring in British clay -beds, it would indicate 

 that at some former period a climate similar to that 

 of Greenland prevailed over British latitudes, for we 

 have no reason to suppose that the relations of life to 

 external conditions were ever otherwise than at pre- 

 sent; and as climatic changes depend on the slow 

 oscillations and distributions of sea and land, an im- 

 mense time must have elapsed since those boreal 

 shells lived in British waters. How long that may 

 have been in years and centuries geology makes no 

 condescension, but contents herself in the meantime 

 with a relative chronology. 



