200 
THE TERTIARY AGE, AND 
at that time. I do not offer any opinion respect- 
ing the fossil human bones so much discussed 
recently, because the evidence is at present too 
scanty to admit of any decisive judgment con- 
cerning them. It becomes, however, daily more 
probable that facts will force us sooner or later to 
admit that the creation of man lies far beyond 
any period yet assigned to it, and that a succes- 
sion of human races, as of animals, have followed 
one another upon the earth. It may be the in- 
estimable privilege of our young naturalists to 
solve this great problem, but the older men of 
our generation must be content to renounce this 
hope ; we may have some prophetic vision of its 
fulfilment, we may look from afar into the land 
of promise, but we shall not enter in and pos- 
sess it. 
The other great types of the Animal Kingdom 
are very fully represented in the Tertiaries, and 
in their general appearance they approach much 
more closely those of the present creation than 
of any previous epochs. Professor Heer has col- 
lected and described the Tertiary Insects in great 
number and variety ; and the Butterflies, Bugs, 
Flies, Grasshoppers, Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., 
described in his volumes, would hardly be distin- 
guished from our own, except by a practised en- 
tomologist. Among Crustacea, the Shrimp-like 
forms of the earlier geological epochs have be- 
