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whatever it may be -wortli — points unmistakably to 

 an Oriental descent, race after race, for the inhabitants 

 of Europe ; and thus while the men of Western Europe 

 were fashioning flint implements and combating with 

 the difficulties of their situation, earlier races may 

 have been enjoying the amenities of a comparatively 

 advanced civilisation in Southern Asia. " It is not 

 under the hard conditions of the glacial epoch in 

 Europe," says the late Dr. Hugh Falconer, a cautious 

 and most unprejudiced reasoner,* "that the earliest 

 relics of the human race upon the globe are to be 

 sought. Like the Esquimaux, Tchukche, and Samoyeds 

 on the shores of the Icy Sea at the present day, men 

 must have been then and there an emigrant placed 

 under circumstances of rigorous and uncertain ex- 

 istence, unfavourable to the struggle of life and to the 

 maintenance and spread of the species. It is rather 

 in the great alluvial valleys of tropical and sub- 

 tropical rivers, like the Ganges, the Irawaddy, and 

 the Mle, where we may expect to detect the vestiges 

 of his earliest abode. It is there where the necessaries 

 of life are produced by nature in the greatest variety 

 and profusion, and obtained with the smallest effort — 

 there where climate exacts the least protection against 



* " On the asserted occurrence of human hones in the ancient 

 fluviatile deposits of the Nile and Ganges. " — Quarterly Jmi/mal of 

 the Geological Society, 1865. 



