22 FOSSIL MAMMALIA. 



such assertions were founded, have proved that these authors 

 were utterly mistaken. We refer our readers to the preHmi- 

 nary discourse of the Baron to his *' Ossemens Fossiles,"" for 

 the most complete satisfaction on this question. The same 

 may be asserted of all articles of human fabrication. Nothing 

 of that description has ever been found indicating the exist- 

 ence of the human race at an era antecedent to the last ge- 

 neral catastrophe of this globe, in those countries where the 

 strata have been examined, and the fossils discoveries we are 

 treating of been made. Yet there is nothing in the compo- 

 sition of human bones that should prevent their being pre- 

 served as well as any others. There is no principle of pre- 

 mature decomposition in their texture. They are found in 

 ancient fields of battle equally well preserved with those of 

 horses, whose bones we know are found abundantly in the 

 proper fossil state. Neither can it be said that the compara- 

 tive smallness of human bones has anything to do with the 

 question, when it is recollected, that fossil remains of some of 

 the smallest of the rodentia are to be found in a state of pre- 

 servation. 



The result, then, of all our investigations serves to prove that 

 the human race was not coeval with the fossil general and 

 species : for no reason can be assigned why man should have 

 escaped from the revolutions which destroyed those other 

 beings, nor, if he did not escape, why his remains should not 

 be found intermingled with theirs. His bones are found occa- 

 sionally in sufficient abundance in the latest and most super_ 

 ficial depositions of our globe, where their bones are never 

 found : their bones are in immense quantities in some of the 

 ancient strata of the earth, where no traces of him exist. Human 

 remains in caverns and fissures, along vrith some of those more 

 ancient debris, prove nothing for the affirmative of man's co- 

 eval existence with the lost species. Their freshness proves 

 the lateness of their origin ; their fewness, the impossibility that 

 mankind could have been established in the adjacent regions at 



