GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 
309 
And further, 4thly. That the period at which their entombment took place was sub- 
sequent to the Boulder Clay period, and to that extent post-glacial ; and also that it 
was amongst the latest in geological time, — one apparently immediately anterior to the 
surface assuming its present form, so far as it regards some of the minor features. 
It is true that no remains of Man himself have yet been found, — that is still to be 
desired ; but if it be admitted that the flint-implements are his work, the negative point 
becomes an argument of less value. 
MTiilst abstaining from any general hypothesis in explanation of the phenomena, 
there is, however, one point to which I must refer before concluding, although I cannot, 
at present, venture beyond a few generalities respecting it. It might be supposed that 
in assigning to Man an appearance at such a period, it would of necessity imply his 
existence drn’ing long ages beyond all exact calculations ; for we have been apt to place 
even the latest of om’ geological changes at a remote, and, to us, unknown distance. 
The reasons on which such a view has been held have been, mainly, — the great lapse 
of time considered requisite for the dying out of so many species of great Mammals, — 
the circumstance that many of the smaller valleys have been excavated since they lived, 
— the presumed non-existence of Man himself, — and the great extent of the later and 
more modern accumulations. But we have in this part of Europe no succession of 
strata to record a gradual dying out of the species, but much, on the contrary, which 
points to an abrupt end, and evidence only of relative and not of actual time ; while 
the recent valley-deposits, although often indicating considerable age, show rates of 
growth, which, though variable, appear, on the whole, to have been comparatively rapid. 
The evidence, in fact, as it at present stands, does not seem to me to necessitate the 
carrying of man back in past time, so much as the bringing forward of the extinct 
animals towards our own time; my own previous opinion, founded upon an independent 
study of the superficial drift or Pleistocene deposits, having likewise been certainly in 
favour of the latter view. There are numerous phenomena, which I can only consider 
as evidence of a sudden change, and of a rapid and transitory action and modification 
of the surface, at a comparatively recent geological period — a period which, if the 
foregoing facts are truly interpreted, would seem nevertheless to have been marked, 
before its end, by the presence of Man, on a land clothed with a vegetation apparently 
very similar to. that now fiourishing in like latitudes, and whose waters were inhabited 
by Testacea also of forms now living ; while on the surface of that land there lived 
Mammalia, of which some species are yet the associates of man, although accompanied 
by others, many of them of gigantic size, and of forms now extinct. 
2 T 
MDCCCLX. 
