1884.] Man tn the Tertiaries. 1005 
scantiest traces are met with. The very conditions of life which 
characterized early man and his associates, render the preserva- 
tion of their remains a matter of extreme improbability. The 
Herbivora, in herds, seeking the shelter of watery places to avoid 
heat and insect annoyances would, in dying, become mired, and 
thus preserved in a matrix for the future explorer. The heavier 
mammals, like the mastodon, would become engulfed by their 
own weight under conditions which would preserve them, and 
these are not supposititious cases, but in accordance with facts 
connected with their discovery and preservation. Aquatic forms 
are infinitely more abundant as fossils than land or aérial forms. 
Professor Marsh, in his monograph on the fossil toothed birds of 
America, testifies to the extreme rarity of the remains of land 
birds over those of aquatic habits. 
_ The arboreal ancestors of man, and the probable habits of man 
himself, would leave their bones to bleach in the field or forest, to 
decompose and disappear long before an entombment were possi- 
ble. It was only when man acquired the art of sepulture or 
sought refuge in caves that the preservation of his remains be- 
came assured, 
Even after man sought the shelter of caves or acquired the art 
of burial, surface changes have been so widespread and profound 
as to nearly obliterate all evidences of those places. Professor 
Dawkins, the eminent archeologist and geologist, says that 
while there have been caverns in all geological periods, they have 
been obliterated by “the rain, the alternations of heat and 
cold, the acids evolved from decaying vegetation and the breakers 
on the seashore,” and this abrasion and destruction has been so 
extensive and thorough that Professor Dawkins recalls only two 
caverns that can be said to.be as old as the Middle Pliocene. 
Even when these caves have been preserved, the harvest from 
them has been of the most meager description. 
Schmerling, who examined nearly fifty caves in Belgium, found 
Auman remains in only two or three of them. Lund, who exam- 
ined eight hundred caves in Brazil, found only six containing 
human remains, It would seem as if the elements had conspired 
to efface every record of that creature who alone takes any inter- 
est in his own origin. We survey large areas rich in the works 
of man, yet find no traces of the bones of man himself. The 
Swiss lake-dwellers we know minutely from the débris of their 
