still roved the south of Europe), in which he familiarly des- 

 cribes their diseases — their tastes ; for example, their love of 

 curiosities, as evinced by fossil collections of shells, &c. ; their 

 warlike habits, as evinced by the skeletons of men not being 

 found in the same proportion as the women who died at home; 

 and he talks of their industry, superstition, and respect for the 

 dead, all of which he infers from circumstances connected 

 with either the position or material of the objects found in 

 the caves ; and this brings us to the much debated question, 

 Was man co-existent with any, and if so, with which of 

 the extinct animals ? Geologists have hitherto held that 

 man was a subsequent creation, but many facts have recently 

 come to light, which if they do not carry the existence of 

 man farther back in the vista of years, certainly bring the 

 existence of extinct fossil animals farther towards our own 

 time. It is not many years since a Mammoth was discovered 

 in arctic Russia frozen up in a mass of ice, not only in a fossil 

 condition, but with flesh on his enormous bones, tufts of 

 coarse reddish hair and bristles on his hard leathery skin, and 

 even the eyes perfect. The Mastodon has been discovered in 

 America, associated with some of those mysterious remains of 

 human work in some far far off age, and it has even been 

 suggested that these vast marvels were used as beasts of 

 burden to carry some of the ingeniously carved masses which 

 are occasionally found, though I must confess a Mastodon 

 with a packsaddle, or a Mammoth with a crupper, are quite 

 opposed to all one's notions of the dignity of the primeval 

 giants! The extinct Irish Elk has been discovered in Ireland, 

 not only associated with men's bones, but with holes in the 

 forehead, evidently caused by some fossil butcher's axe, and 

 at Wexford some remains of the Elk were discovered in so 

 recent a condition that the Royal Dublin Society made soup of 

 the bones, whether they enjoyed it I can't say, but it appears 

 rather an Irish method of pursuing a Scientific investigation 1 

 But then if, as we are told by some recent investigators, man 

 existed in a state of civilization in the Nile valley 13,500 years 

 ago, what are we to think? All our preconceived ideas of the 

 age of the world are upset, and we can only reflect how very 

 little we know, for certain, on any subject. I spoke, just now, 

 of the air teeming with life, but Natural History teaches us 

 that the sea is sometimes literally converted into a living mass. 



