288 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



to believe thera capable of commercial enterprises at all. Moreover, 

 the traffic in flint weapons presupposes the means of international 

 communication ; we doubt very much if the flint-implement men, 

 who could do no more than cliip stones, — who did not know even 

 how to grind them, — had any means for this. The Veddahs of one 

 tribe at this hour do not know the Veddahs of another tribe, their next 

 neighbours ; less than fifty miles of mere territory part them. Tor 

 our own part, we think so poorly of the flint-implement men as to 

 be scarcely inclined to feel any more pride in a pedigree from them 

 than from the much-abused and hirsute Gorilla. 



4. Why has this industrial population of the ancient world left no 

 other trace of its existence? Why, ahove all, do we not find human 

 remains ? — How many skeletons of all the known species of fossil 

 monkeys all over the globe have been exhumed from their stony 

 tombs ? Are there a hundred fragments in all the collections of all 

 the museums and naturalists in every region and part of the earth ? 

 And have we found every kind of fossil monkey yet ? JSTo sane man 

 will assert it. Human teeth have been found in Pleistocene strata 

 as old as the gravel-beds ; negative evidence we have seen too often 

 to mean nothing, to trust it in a question like this. Human remains 

 have been found with bones of the mammoth, and fossil deer and 

 bear, although these are ignored. Those as yet found we admit may 

 not be the remains of the flint-implement-making men. " Wait pa- 

 tiently, they will yet be found." But will M. Gras declare that there 

 are not in the gravel-beds of the Somme seams of brittle lignite ; and 

 will he venture to assert tliat these may not be the charred remains 

 of huts ? 



Take another view. The beast, when he sickens to die, goes to 

 some retired spot and leaves his inanimate carcass on the soil. There 

 it may become embedded, or the floods may lift and strand it on some 

 shallow bank. Nature buries it or moulders it, and returns it dust to 

 dust in her own way. "When a man dies, the case is diff'erent. The cow 

 weeps not for the death of the bull, the lion sheds no tears for the 

 loss of the lioness, the hippopotamus scrapes no hole in the earth to 

 bury its lifeless mate, the gorilla lights no fire to burn to ashes the 

 mother of its progeny. The lowest of human beings must have had 

 human passions and human feelings. The primitive wife, little sensible 

 as we can but conceive of anything like fine sensations, would, de- 

 graded as ever we could possibly conceive her, naturally weep for the 

 loss of her husbajid ; and though no priest performed a marriage 



