THE SURFACE OF THE GLOBE. 



155 



The class of glires, composed generally of a weak and small species, 

 has had but little notice from fossil collectors ; and yet its remains, in 

 the layers and deposites of which we are treating, have also presented 

 unknown species, such in particular is a species of lagomys of the os- 

 seous bracciae of Corsica and Sardinia, somewhat similar to the Alpine 

 lagomys of the high mountains of Siberia ; so true is it, that it is not 

 in the torrid zone that we must always seek for animals resembling 

 those of the epoch preceding the last general catastrophe. 



These are the principal animals whose remains have been discovered 

 in that mass of earth, of sand and of mud, in that diluvium, which 

 everywhere covers our vast plains, fills our caverns, and chokes up the 

 fissures of many of our large rocks. They formed most indubitably 

 the population of the continents at the epoch of the great catastrophe 

 which has destroyed their race, and which prepared the soil on which 

 the animals of the present day subsist. Whatever resemblance cer- 

 tain of the species of the present day offer to them, it cannot be dis- 

 puted that the total of this population had a totally distinct character, 

 and that the majority of the races which composed it have been anni- 

 hilated. 



It is wonderful, that among all these mammifera, of which at the pre- 

 sent day the greater part have a congenerate species in the warm cli- 

 mates, there has not been one quadrumanous animal, not a single 

 bone, or a single tooth of a monkey, not even a bone or a tooth of an 

 extinct species of this animal. 



Neither is there any remains of man. All the bones of the human 

 race which have been collected along with those which we have 

 spoken of, have been the result of accident *, and besides their 

 number is extremely small, which it certainly would not be if men 

 had then been established in the countries inhabited by these ani- 

 mals. Where then was the human race ? Did the last and most per- 

 fect work of the Creator exist nowhere ? Did the animals which now 

 accompany him on earth, and of which there are no fossil remains 

 to be traced, surround him ? Have the lands in which they lived 

 together been swallowed up, when those which they now inhabit, and 

 of which, a great inundation might have destroyed the anterior popu- 

 lation, were again left dry ? On this head the study of fossils gives 



* See, in Mr. Buekland's ' Reliquiae Diluvianse,' an account of the skeleton of a 

 female found in a cave in Pavyland ; and in my ' Recherches,' v. iv. p. 193, concern- 

 ing a fragment of a jaw found in the osseous brecciae, at Nice. 



M. de Schlotheim collected human bones in the fissures of Kcestritz, where there 

 are also rhinoceros bones ; but he himself is doubtful as to the epoch of their de- 

 position. 



q3 



