110 
these cases must be abandoned, while as to the rest, they are 
by no means to be relied on ; in fact, as the evidence now 
stands, the careful geologist does not recognize any traces of 
the existence of man prior to the close of the quaternary 
period. As the glacial epoch died away, man appeared, and 
his relics are found in the ancient gravel-beds of the river- 
valleys of Europe and India, and in the bone-caves of Eui’ope, 
associated in both cases with the bones of extinct animals, 
such as the mammoth, rhinoceros tichorinus, reindeer, &c. 
Since these gravels were deposited in their present position, 
most of the peat-beds of Europe have been formed, and great 
changes have taken place in the physical geography of the 
country. These facts, and the great mass of gravel and loess 
under which the flint axes are buried, give the appearance of 
great antiquity to these relics, and have created the present 
prevailing belief in the vast antiquity of the human race. My 
own opinion is, after bestowing a great deal of attention upon 
these phenomena, that they can all bo explained in accordance 
with the recent appearance of man in Europe ; but in the 
present paper I do not propose to go into the subject, save for 
the purpose of calling attention to a single point. It is ad- 
mitted that the cave-earth and the river-gravel are post-glacial, 
and that they were deposited just after the formation of the 
boulder-clay and the retirement of the ice from the regions 
which were affected by the glacial influences. If, therefore, 
wo can find any clue to the date of the glacial epoch, we can 
fix approximately the date of man’s appearance in Northern 
and Central Europe. Various attempts have been made to fix 
the date of the ice age by calculations based on the depth, 
and rate of deposit, of the quaternary alluvions, and tho rate 
of recession of the great cataracts of the Niagara and the 
Mississippi. MM. De Perry and Arcelin have made such a 
calculation from the relics of the iron, the bronze, and the 
stone age, found in the alluvial deposits of tho valley of the 
Saone. By independent observations both of these dis- 
tinguished archaeologists ascertained (as they believed) that 
the relics of the palaeolithic age found in this valley are somo 
6,000 or 8,000 years old. M. Rene Kerviler has made similar 
observations at the mouth of the Loire, and arrived at about 
tho same result. In America, Professor N. II. Wiuchell has 
calculated the rate of recession of the falls of St. Anthony, 
on the Upper Mississippi, and estimates that these falls have 
been from 6,000 to 8,000 years in cutting their way back from 
Port Snelling, where the cataract was first formed at the close 
of the “ second ” glacial epoch. 
