HIS GEOLOGICAL RELATIONS. 131 



fragments of vegetable food found witliin their 

 skeletons, and other particulars we have learned of 

 them from their discovery in the frozen soils of 

 Siberia, give ample evidence of their adaptation to a 

 rigorous climate — so rigorous, that at the time they 

 roamed over the latitudes of France and England 

 glaciers may have come down to the sea-shores, and 

 icebergs floated on the waters. Such vicissitudes in 

 geographical conditions involve an enormous lapse of 

 time, and no unprejudiced mind can review these 

 facts without coming to the conclusion that man has 

 been an inhabitant of Western Europe for ages ante- 

 cedent to the date of the ordinarily-accepted chro- 

 nology. Indeed the conviction is irresistible, " if," as 

 has been aptly remarked by Baron Bunsen,* "the 

 space of time during which man has existed on the 

 face of our mother earth be measured, not by con- 

 ventional notions arising out of ignorance and 

 sanctioned by prejudice, but by facts which any one 

 is capable of investigating who does not shrink from 

 researches determinable with logical demonstration 

 and mathematical cogency." 



But high as may be the antiquity of man in 

 Europe, it cannot be set down as the Umit of his ex- 

 istence in Asia and other regions. AU that we learn 

 from history, from tradition, or from ethnology — 

 * Egypt's Place in Universal History, vol. iv. 



