30 
THE GEOLOGIST. 
in the field, the greater and more powerful will be the testimony to the truth. 
This leads, of course, to the cousideratiou 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, Schoe- 
merling, and many other ^vl•iters have recorded human skeletons in cave-and 
other deposits containing mammalian remains ; but such has been the constant 
practice of ignoiiug any true association of such remains with those of mam- 
malia in the same deposit — iii 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 xlrabia. 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 iDiportant 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 never 
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 sulDmerf^ed, the great stones and rocks 
uplifted from distant coasts, and strewed oui' 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 diflaculty 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 certain this is so. The latest researches tend to show that the true mammoth 
lived in this 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 
Europe for the explanation. Perhaps we may consider that as the submergence 
of this area took place in the glacial era, the great pachyderms were of neces- 
sity di'iven back in their terrestial range by the sea as it encroached ; and as 
