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Revieios and Notices of Boohs. 



does not agree with Lyell as to the enormous lapse of time since 

 man's appearance on earth, is disposed to believe that man is 

 older than is generally allowed in the received chronology. 



" Admitting the same genetic law for the human race as for the 

 rest of animated nature — and, philosophically speaking, there is 

 no other course left for the adoption of science — the question next 

 arises, At what period of the geological scale did man make his 

 appearance 1 ... So far as research has been prosecuted in the 

 different quarters of the globe — and at the outset it must be con- 

 fessed how insignificant the area that has been examined — no re- 

 mains of man or of his works have been discovered till we come 

 to the lake-silts, the peat-mosses, the river- gravels, and the cave- 

 earths of the Post- tertiary period. In these have been detected 

 tree canoes and stone hatchets, rude implements of flint and bone, 

 the embers of the fires he kindled, and occasional fragments of his 

 own skeleton. As yet these have been chiefly discovered within 

 the limited area of southern and western Europe, and we have 

 scarcely any information from the corresponding deposits of other 

 regions. Till these other regions shall have been examined — and 

 especially Asia, where man historically flourished long prior to 

 his civilisation in Europe — it were premature to hazard any 

 opinion as to man's first appearance on the globe. But taking 

 the facts such as geology finds them — viz., the occurrence of stone 

 implements in conjunction with the remains of Irish-deer, mam- 

 moth, hippopotamus, rhinoceros, cave-lion, and other creatures 

 long since extinct in Europe, and this in deposits of considerable 

 geological antiquity — it is evident that man has been an inhabi- 

 tant of the globe much longer than is popularly believed. It is 

 true that the antiquity of some of the containing deposits, espe- 

 cially the river-drifts, is open to question, and it is also quite 

 possible that the remains of the extinct quadrupeds may in some 

 instances have been reassorted from older accumulations ; but 

 even allowing for these, geologists have suflficient in the valley- 

 deposits of France and England, the caves of southern and western 

 Europe, and the lake-silts of the same area, to convince every 

 mind capable of appreciating the evidence, that mankind has ex- 

 isted even there (to say nothing of Asia) long antecedent to the 

 time assigned by the patristic chronologers as the date of his 

 creation, 



" But while the nature of the deposits, their situation, and 

 their mode of formation, indicate the lapse of many thousand 

 years (estimating by the nsual modes of geological computation), 

 we must be careful not to run into the opposite extreme, and 

 conjure up ages of fabulous duration. Historically we have no 

 means of arriving at the age of these deposits ; geologically we 

 can only approximate the time by comparison with existing opera- 

 tions ; while palseontologically it must be borne in mind that the 



