368 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



But it has been imagined that the close of the reign of ice 

 dates back perhaps a hundred thousand years. There is 

 no evidence of this. The cone of drift materials accumu- 

 lated at the mouth of the Tiniere, in which have been found 

 human remains, was estimated by Morlot to be from 96,000 

 to 143,000 years old; but Dr. Andrews has exposed a curi- 

 ous arithmetical blunder, the correction of which reduces 

 the time to within five thousand years. [See Appendix, 

 Note XL, p. 445.] We have no rule for the measurement 

 of post-tertiary time which necessitates the admission of so 

 high antiquity to our race. If we have been accustomed 

 to think of the extinction of the cave-bear as dating back 

 to high antiquity, we now discover that he lived with man, 

 and the reindeer, and other animals which still survive. 

 The existence of even the cave-bear may not have been so 

 very remote. What are the reasons assigned for the prev- 

 alent opinion that it was many ages ago that the glaciers 

 began to disappear from Europe? Singly the existence 

 at that time of quadrupeds now extinct, together with the 

 presumption, unsupported, as it seems, by the facts, that no 

 animals have coexisted with man except those of the recent 

 fauna. The fact is, that we come ourselves upon the earth 

 in time to witness the retreat of the glaciers. They still 

 linger in the valleys of the Alps, and along the northern 

 shores of Europe and Asia, while the disappearance of an- 

 imals once contemporaries of man is still continuing. Not 

 only did contemporaries of man become extinct during the 

 Age of Stone ; some survived to the twelfth, fourteenth, 

 and sixteenth centuries, as already stated; the Moa of New 

 Zealand, and the iEpiornis of Madagascar, have become 

 extinct within the epoch of tradition, as indeed has the 

 Mammoth of North America ; the Dodo of Mauritius dis- 

 appeared in the seventeenth century; the Great Auk of 

 the arctic regions has not been seen for half a century; 



