324 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 



congeners, cannot lay claim to the vast antiquity which 

 many geologists have been so anxious to assign to them. 

 Still, with all these facts and allowances, it must ever be 

 remembered that the occurrence of hairy elephants and 

 woolly rhinoceroses in Western Europe bespeaks a much 

 colder climate than the present ; and as changes in climate 

 can only arise from great physical changes, great alterations 

 must have taken place in the external conditions of our con- 

 tinent. Such changes are ever slow and gradual, and thus 

 we are compelled to admit a high antiquity to the fashioners 

 of these flint implements and their contemporaries, the mam- 

 moth and mastodon. 



Indeed, the existence of a boreal climate necessitating 

 shaggy coverings for the elephant and rhinoceros, would 

 seem to carry us back to times immediately post-glacial — 

 that is, to the time when the last traces of the glacial epoch 

 were gradually being effaced by the advent of a more genial 

 and equable climate. Were this the case, the appearance 

 of man in Europe would be coeval with the earlier Post- 

 tertiaries, and his antiquity much higher than the majority 

 of geologists are yet prepared to admit. But his occurrence 

 in Europe does not settle the question of his first appearance 

 on the globe. On the contrary, the human race, in one or 

 other of its varieties, may have existed for ages in Asia or 

 Africa before it found its way to Western Europe, and, in- 

 deed, all that we know of language and ethnology seems to 

 point to this conclusion. Before we can arrive at the abso- 

 lute antiquity of man, or of his real place in the Geological 

 Kecord, we must know more of the Asiatic and African 

 Post-tertiaries, and more of the correlation of these to the 

 Post-tertiary accumulations of Europe. We must also learn 

 to deal with man as with other fossil genera, and instead of 

 seeking for mere variations in skull and facial angle, we 

 must be prepared to admit variations that amount to true 

 specific distinctions. All animals in the history of the 

 past, if they have existed long enough, break into varieties 

 and species ; and it will be a proof of man's comparative 

 recentness, if we can discover no wider difference than 

 mere varieties ; but, on the contrary, it will be evidence of 



