324 Proceedings of the Boyal Physical Society. 
congeners, cannot lay claim to the vast antiquity which 
many geologists have been so anxious to assign to them. 
Still, with all these facts and allowances, it must ever be 
remembered that the occurrence of hairy elephants and 
woolly rhinoceroses in Western Europe bespeaks a much 
colder climate than the present ; and as changes in climate 
can only arise from great physical changes, great alterations 
must have taken place in the external conditions of our con- 
tinent. Such changes are ever slow and gradual, and thus 
we are compelled to admit a high antiquity to the fashioners 
of these flint implements and their contemporaries, the mam- 
moth and mastodon. 
Indeed, the existence of a boreal climate necessitating 
shaggy coverings for the elephant and rhinoceros, wwld 
seem to carry us back to times immediately post-glacial — 
that is, to the time when the last traces of the glacial epoch 
were gradually being effaced by the advent of a more genial 
and equable climate. Were this the case, the appearance 
of man in Europe would be coeval with the earlier Post- 
tertiaries, and his antiquity much higher than the majority 
of geologists are yet prepared to admit. But his occurrence 
in Europe does not settle the question of his first appearance 
on the globe. On the contrary, the human race, in one or 
other of its varieties, may have existed for ages in Asia or 
Africa before it found its way to Western Europe, and, in- 
deed, all that we know of language and ethnology seems to 
point to this conclusion. Before we can arrive at the abso- 
lute antiquity of man, or of his real place in the Geological 
Kecord, we must know more of the Asiatic and African 
Post-tertiaries, and more of the correlation of these to the 
Post-tertiary accumulations of Europe. We must also learn 
to deal with man as with other fossil genera, and instead of 
seeking for mere variations in skull and facial angle, we 
must be prepared to admit variations that amount to true 
specific distinctions. All animals in the history of the 
past, if they have existed long enough, break into varieties i 
and species ; and it will be a proof of man's comparative 
recentness, if we can discover no wider difi'erence than 
mere varieties ; but, on the contrary, it will be evidence of 
