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been rejected by geologists for so many years, bas now oeen generally 
accepted and received. I think the sketch or sketches which have been 
shown in the Paris Exhibition, require considerable confirmation ; but I 
believe there have been . discovered in America the remains of some extinct 
animal — the mastodon, I understand — and underneath those remains were 
found cinders, together with arrow-heads and other instruments of human 
manufacture. At the time of the discovery, however, and owing to the opinions 
which then prevailed among geologists, the evidence of this, to use a vulgar 
phrase, was “ burked ” and laid aside. I think the whole tendency of 
modern discovery goes to prove that many animals, which were considered 
to have existed long before the creation of man, really did exist within the 
human period. I believe the tendency of modern discovery has been to 
carry back the history of man into geological periods, in which the existence 
of man was never previously dreamed of. But whether these things are to 
carry us up to the enormous periods which geologists are now maintaining, is 
altogether a different matter — 
Rev. 0. A. Row. — My friend mentioned that in the objects I have referred 
to in the Paris Exhibition there were several small figures of pre- Adamite 
animals. He had them in his hands, and his own opinion is that they were 
genuine. His opinion is worth something, for he is an authority upon such 
matters. 
The Chairman-. — I think there is strong evidence of probability in favour 
of those figures, but the whole thing requires sifting. By itself it would 
have very little weight ; but it is combined with a vast number of other facts 
which go to prove that man has lived contemporaneously with the mammoth 
and the mastodon, and many other animals which have been considered as long 
anterior to the creation of man. Returning now to the subject immediately 
before us, I think that nothing I have heard has controverted the main 
position taken up in this paper, viz., that man did not rise from a savage, 
state by long and slow and almost imperceptible degrees, into a state of civili- 
zation ; but that there was in the beginning a high state of civilization, from 
which all history and tradition points out man to have originated. We have 
been asked, no doubt pertinently, how then we are to account for the rapid 
degeneration from civilization, which must have happened to certain races. 
I think, however, that that point was fully accounted for by what was pointed 
out by Mr. De La Mare — that it is only the revelation of Holy Scripture which 
throws the slightest amount of light upon a very important historical fact. 
The fall of man, and consequent deterioration of man’s spiritual nature, is 
the only thing which will account for the very rapid demoralization into 
which man can fall. To discover how rapid that process may be, we have 
no need to go among the tribes of India, the barbarians of America, or the 
low state of barbarism existing in Australia ; we need go no farther than 
our own highly civilized and Christian lands, where those men and women 
who have been allowed for a short time to follow the natural tendencies of the 
human, mind, and the natural tendency to degeneration existing in the 
human heart, have sunk, when without the influence of Revelation, into the 
