GEOLOGY. 613 



reveal to us that vestiges of antediluvian races exist in the 

 ground. Lyell, Lartet, and M. Boucher de Perthes are 

 unanimous on this point. 



Is it not then strange to hear, that at the very time 

 when modern science was making every effort to deny 

 that man and the great races of mammals were contempo- 

 rary, the affirmative was in some measure already inter- 

 woven in the rhapsodical traditions of the North American 

 savages. Jefferson says the Virginians are convinced that 

 the mastodons, the bones of which are so often found in 

 their country, lived there at the same time as their fore- 

 fathers, but that as they (the mastodons) destroyed all the 

 animals which Avere useful to men, the Great Spirit de- 

 stroyed them all with his thunderbolts, except the strongest 

 of their males, the mail-clad brow of which shook off the 

 bolts as they struck him. 



The lake dwellings, of which so many remains have 

 been recently discovered in the lakes of Switzerland, Scot- 

 land, and Denmark, also attest the antiquity of man on 

 the globe. It is no longer possible now-a-days to deny 

 that these singular constructions, raised on piles, served 

 in pre-liistoric times to shelter the first human races. We 

 can no longer doubt respecting this point, now that among 



diluviennes et Fossihs Diluviens des Carrieres de Quatremares, de Sottevilh et de 

 Saint- EiieivM. ilouen, 1861. 



[It seems difBciiIt to understand how any unprejudiced person who has 

 really examined the evidence can refuse to believe that man lived on this globe 

 many thousands of years before history began. It is as certain as anything can 

 be that flint implements wrought by human hands have been found not in one 

 or two, but in many places, especially widisturhed caves, beneath or embedded 

 in stalagmite containing remains of the gi'eat cave-bear, the cave-hyena, tlie 

 mammoth, cave-lion, and rhinoceros, and that man's era certainly goes back 

 to at any rate the decline of the great glacial period, even if he did not exist 

 before it. They have been met with also in river-drifts interbedded with the 

 bones of the mammoth and rhinoceros, and in fresh-water formations, together 

 with the bones of the elephant. — The Stream of Life on our Globe, chap. ii. — Tr.] 



