288 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
to believe them 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 Yeddahs of one 
tribe at this hour do not know the Yeddahs of another tribe, their next 
neighbours ; less than fifty miles of mere territory part them. For 
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 lias this industrial population of the ancient icorld left no 
other trace of its existence? Why, above 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 ? JN'o 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. Grras declare that there 
are not in the gravel-beds of the Somme seams of brittle lignite ; and 
•will he venture to assert that 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 difl'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 husband ; and though no priest performed a marriage 
