GEOLOGICAL TOPICS. 



479 



species admit botanical determination. Nearly the whole of these 

 species were objects of culture, and consequently introduced from 

 other countries simultaneously with, or soon after, the immigi^ation 

 of the tribes who peopled ancient Egypt. Many of them, as the 

 date-palm, the flax, the cerealia, etc., may be proved to have been 

 cultivated as early as under the reign of Menes (B.C., 3623). Prof, 

 linger has found no traces of any change from one species into 

 another having taken place dm^ing a period of nearly fifty centuries, 

 from Menes to our times. 



Ossiferous Cavern. Proceed. Imp. Academy, Vienna, July 14, 1859. 



Prof. 0. Schmidt, of Gratz, has found in the Grebeuzer Alp, Upper 

 Styria, a fissure, or cavern, containing remarkably well preserved re- 

 mains of the Elk, together with those of another extinct species of 

 the genus Cervus. 



GEOLOGICAL TOPICS. 



THE EIRST TRACES OE MAN ON THE EARTH. 



f Continued from page 431.) 



Tlie second volume of M. de Perthes' book, that Tvhieli we have to deal with 

 especially in this notice, is illustrated by twenty-six plates contauiing 

 nearly five hundred figures. In the interim, too, between the publication of 

 the first and second volumes, that author added greatly to his collection of 

 primitive (antediluvian) and Celtic instruments (those of historic periods). 

 This collection is now unrivalled, and has been accumulated by travels and pur- 

 chases from aU parts of the world. To make sure of the origin of these 

 objects, M. Boucher de Perthes has himself been to search for them, not only 

 in the North, in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, 

 but also in the South, where these stone-implements are much rarer, in Spain, 

 Italy, Sicily, Greece, Turkey, along the shores of the Black Sea, and lastly, he 

 has carried his researches even into Asia and the Erench African possessions. 

 His object in these travels was not only to collect specimens, but also to aoii- 

 sult foreign ; and he acknowledges in glowing terms the courtesy he 



everywhere met with, and the flatteriug and ready aid given to his researches. 

 His book, so controverted in Erance, he found had met with better reception 

 abroad, and morever that it had also been better comprehended as detailing the 

 proofs that " a race before unknown, a human famdy of which the origui was 

 lost in the night of Time — a race contemporaneous with the great pachyderms 

 of which Ave find the remains, had hved upon the soil we tread, and, many ages 

 old, had been witness to terrible revolutions, and at length to that last catas- 

 trophe which had changed the surface of the globe, and modified, with its 

 climates, the form of nearly every living species." The former long existence 

 in Europe of this people, which M. Boucher de Perthes considers to have 

 ended with the Deluge, is supported by demonstrative proofs. 



