﻿ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. Ixxi 



of a marine or brackish-water Aralo-Caspian limestone hundreds of 

 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, may encourage us to hope 

 that we may hereafter be able to find a geological date for the origin 

 of man, less vague than that which we can at present assign to the 

 event. But so far as our interpretation of physical movements has 

 yet gone, we have every reason to infer that the human race is 

 extremely modern, even when compared to the larger number of 

 species now our contemporaries on the earth. 



In fluviatile deposits, such as the loess of the Rhine and the Mis- 

 sissippi, where the land and freshwater shells are of living species, 

 we find no human bones or articles fabricated by man ; nor in the 

 elevated tufaceous strata near Naples, or the raised beaches of Nor- 

 way, or the brackish-water strata several hundred feet high, bound- 

 ing the Baltic, nor in the stratified glacial drift, in all of which ma- 

 rine shells are imbedded, referable, with few exceptions, to living- 

 species. I have explained my reasons for not assenting to the alleged 

 antiquity of certain human bones, supposed to have been as ancient 

 as the Mastodon and Megalonyx, in the loess near Natchez on the 

 Mississippi*. In cave deposits which contain the bones of extinct 

 quadrupeds, mixed with the remains of a small number of recent 

 species of the same class, no human skeletons or fabricated articles 

 have been found. There are, indeed, some few alleged exceptions to 

 this rule, but by no means sufficiently authenticated to prove that 

 man coexisted with an extinct mammiferous fauna ; for the possi- 

 bility of human remains having become subsequently mingled with 

 those of older date, whether by natural causes or by burial in the sta- 

 lagmite and alluvium of caverns, must be taken into account. In South 

 America no less than 800 caves were explored by those indefatigable 

 naturalists, Lund and Clausen, and they obtained the bones of 101 

 species of mammalia belonging to 50 genera, a fauna more rich and 

 varied than that now inhabiting the same country. Among all these, 

 only one species of quadruped could be identified with the recent. 

 After ransacking so many hundred caves they met with human bones 

 in six only, and in one of these alone were they mixed with the re- 

 mains of extinct animals in such a manner as to seem to imply that 

 they had belonged to the same epoch. In this one example, the 

 bones are said to have been in the same state or condition as those 

 * See my Second Visit to the United States, vol. ii. p. 196. 



