458 RECENT ADVANCES IN GEOLOGY. 
delineations, I am disposed to think, are of the mastodon, 
and, found as they are upon the walls of stone-built palaces 
and temples, there is strong evidence to believe that this 
great Proboscidian survived almost to the Historic Period. 
The men of the Reindeer Epoch made gradual advances 
in the industrial arts. They did not cultivate the soil, for 
the climate was still inhospitable. While their progenitors 
were content with knives flaked from flints in the form of 
rude fragments with cutting edges, they wrought out tools 
more symmetrical, but without any attempt at polishing. 
They attained to a very creditable degree of artistic skill, 
as shown by their designs traced on tablets of ivory, and 
carved out of the antlers of the reindeer. We have thus 
represented the stag, the ibex, the horse, a reindeer couch- 
ant forming a dagger-hilt, and also the great elephant with 
his characteristic markings; the small oblique eye, the pon- 
derous trunk, the recurved tusks, and the shaggy mane. 
The human form even is delineated. We have an ivory 
statuette of the female figure, and traced on a stag's horn 
the outline of a male figure with a caudal appendage like 
that which was conjectured by Lord Mondoddo, the eccen- 
tric Seoteh philosopher, to appertain to the primitive man. 
On this continent the evidenees of the existence of man 
at this age, while obscure, are yet, I am disposed to believe, 
authentic. The human bone found in the Loess at Natchez, 
and the flint implements found in connection with the Mis- 
souri mastodon, may claim as high an antiquity as the oldest 
of the European “finds.” 
The discoveries in California would seem to carry back 
the existence of man to a remote date. As far back as 1857 
Dr. C. F. Winslow sent to the Boston Natural History So- 
ciety a fragment of a human cranium found in the “paydirt” 
in connection with the bones of the mastodon and elephant, 
one hundred and eighty feet below the surface of Table 
Mountain, California. It was in this region (Angeles, Cal- 
averas County) that a human skull was subsequently found 
