1 6 Prehistoric Races, 



nature, human still in the midst of its degrada- 

 tion, yet states and periods, republics and empires 

 Periods neyer have no such resurrection before them. 

 recur. They have only a single course to 



run, a single goal to reach and turn, and, fleeting 

 like a courier, they are seen no more. They live, 

 grow, and dissolve; there is no resurrection for 

 them. So that, if the records are not saved before 

 the courier disappears, he will never return to bring 

 them. All will have faded into the prehistoric. 



9. The obscurity enveloping such a movement 

 of transition, when barbarism is one of the termini, 



has given some wide scope to certain 

 rilmudes P la titudes about these cave-men. The 



air of an ascertained geography and 

 chronology is thrown about these ancestors of ours, 

 who are to be conceived, it is said, as crouching in 

 caves and crunching the bones of wild beasts. A 

 specimen of such platitudes offended our eyes the 

 other day, when, answering the ex-Premier of Eng- 

 land, a noted writer discoursed some rhetoric thus, 

 in his most conclusive style : " It is hardly possible 

 to conceive of the years that lie between the caves 

 in which crouched our native ancestors crunching 

 the bones of wild beasts, and the home of the civil- 

 ized man. Think of the billowed years that must 

 have rolled between these shores!" Here is an air 

 of scientific geography and an immeasurable chron- 

 ology thrown about poor people, who certainly were 

 badly off. But it scarcely requires science to see 



