30 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



in the field, the greater and more powerful will be the testimony to the truth. 



This leads, of course, to the consideration of the more direct question whether 

 human bones have ever been found in the ossiferous caves and fissures, and 

 ordinary mammaliferous deposits ? Undoubtedly they have; Buckland, Sckoe- 

 merling, and many other writers have recorded human skeletons in cave-and 

 other deposits containing mammalian remains ; but such has been the constant 

 practice of ignoring any true association of such remains with those of mam- 

 malia in the same deposit — in fact an utter refusal to admit any evidences of a 

 greater antiquity than some 5,000 or 6,000 years for the creation of the human 

 race — so that authors neglected such evidence when they found it, or wrote 

 obscurely and timidly about it, even when it was forced in an undeniable manner 

 upon their notice. Hence the reason why we have few or no illustrative cases. 

 It may be worth while here to allude to another class of existing antiquities — 

 the great monoliths and other stone monuments — found alike in our own and the 

 remotest and most distant and widely separated lands, whether as the supposed 

 " Druid's circles," " sacrificial altars," and rock-basins of our own country, 

 the raised stones of India, or the rock inscriptions of Arabia. Are these ancient 

 monuments to be associated with the progress of the primitive race to whom we 

 attribute these chipped implements of flint ? Again, I answer not, I merely 

 suggest. In this important investigation no man is yet, perhaps, prepared to 

 answer. We know not, in fact, where we are — we are as it were in a strange 

 land which we have not yet explored, amongst a strange people whose language 

 we have not yet learnt. Soon, perhaps, we may master the task — or it may be 

 long before we unravel the mysteries. " Labour conquers all things," says the 

 Latin proverb, and we must labour on perseveringly to make out the first 

 history of our race. 



I will now turn to another phase of the great geological question we are 

 investigating. Of what age — what relative geological age, that is — are the 

 mammaliferous deposits in which these flint implements are found ? The great 

 age of the drift gravels and other superficial mammaliferous deposits has ne\ er 

 been rigidly determined. "We know that they belong to, or preceded, or were 

 formed just after the memorable Glacial era — when glaciers extended from the 

 mountains of Wales into the valleys now filled with their debris, as they now do 

 in Switzerland ; when the great Swiss glaciers themselves were miles larger in 

 extent : when icebergs dropped as they melted into the sea, under which a 

 great part of our island was then submerged, the great stones and rocks 

 uplifted from distant coasts, and strewed our island and a great part of similary 

 sunken Europe with gigantic boulders and mud, forming those deposits known 

 as the Boulder-drift and Till. The necessity of investigating rigorously the 

 origin of these superficial deposits, has, since the question of the first appearance 

 of man, become imperative ; although the progress made must be neces- 

 sarily slow, and the work often unsafe from the difficulty of always detecting 

 the intermingling of modern matter, to which these nearly superficial beds from 

 their proximity to the actual surface, have been of necessity subject. But 

 such difficulties must no longer stand in the way, they must be boldly met and 

 fairly grappled with; and in this respect Prestwich, Falconer and other geologists 

 are doing their duty. We must no longer be content to believe that one kind 

 of mammoth was associated with one kind of rhinoceros, and another species 

 of mammoth with another species of rhinoceros; but we must know whether 

 for cert ain this is so. The latest researches tend to show that the true mammoth 

 lived in I his island at least, both before and after the Glacial epoch. If so, we 

 must look to the oscillations of our land and the formerly submerged tract of 

 llu rope for t he explanal ion. Perhaps we may consider that as the submergence 

 of this area took place in the glacial era, the great pachyderms were of neces- 

 sity driven back in their terreslial range by the sea as it encroached; and as 



