tions of climate, one warmer than the present and the other colder. Were this the true explanation, we should expect to find the remains lying in two distinct series, instead of being preserved in intimate association with each other, and in precisely the same condition. If M. D'Archiac's and M. Lartet's view be correct that the Quaternary climate was comparatively warm, how can the presence of the arctic mammalia be accounted for? The problem may easily be explained by an appeal to the physical condition of Europe at the time. Since the land extended at that time a considerable distance into the Atlantic, embracing Britain, and being a far larger and more compact mass than at the present day, the climatal extremes must have been greater. The summer heat must have been more intense, and the winter cold more severe. The soundings in the Mediterranean by Admiral Spratt, coupled with the discovery of African mammalia in the bone caves of Sicily and Malta, prove that Africa extended as far as those two islands, and that the Mediterranean was diminished to a chain of small land-locked seas. By this condition of things the present cooling and equalising effect of the Mediterranean on the temperature would then be reduced to a minimum, and a heated mass of land so near the tropics could not fail to influence to a very considerable extent the summer heat of the European continent. That the winter cold at the time was very severe, we have conclusive proof, not merely from the animals, but also from the ice-borne blocks of stone in the river-deposits in which they occur. The climatal extremes must necessarily follow from this state of things, and they would necessarily cause animals belonging to two different zoological provinces to be intermingled. In the winter, as the temperature gradually became lowered, the arctic mammalia would creep southward, just as they do at the present day in the great plains of Siberia and North America. In the summer, the animals accustomed to a warm climate would gradually advance northwards, and thus every season there would be a continual swinging to and fro over the same area of the two groups of animals, and their remains would be swept down by the rivers and deposited pêle mêle together. The area over which this double migration took place is ascertained with a considerable degree of accuracy. The denizens of the south did not advance further north than the meridian of Yorkshire, nor did the arctic invaders penetrate far beyond the line of the Alps and Pyrenees. Mr. Prestwich gets over the difficulty of the presence of the hippopotamus by supposing that, like the mammoth, it had a covering of hair and wool, as a defence

against the cold. Even if we admit this to be true, the fact that, in the Quaternary winter, our rivers were covered up with ice, would prove this aquatic animal could not have dwelt in our country throughout the year.

We owe this picture of the condition of Quaternary Europe to the unceasing labours of naturalists and geologists, from the time of Cuvier down to the present day, and especially to Sir Charles Lyell, Mr. Prestwich, and the lamented Dr. Falconer. Each detail has been carefully worked out, and subjected to the strictest criticism. The idea of a great diluvial flood, or cataclysm, that devastated the whole of Europe and exterminated the animals, has now long been given up by the savants of England and Germany, partly because all the pre-existent animals were not destroyed, and partly because the transported blocks of stone and other traces of the operation of a great moving force are now clearly assignable to the action of glaciers and icebergs. It still, however, lingers in France. M. Figuier, the compiler of a highly popular elementary work, places this great catastrophe at the end of the Quaternary period.*

We now come to the advent of Palæolithic man upon the scene. The discovery that man was living at the same time with the extinct mammalia in the valley of the Somme, made by M. Boucher de Perthes many years before, was fully recognised in 1859, as well as the full significance of the flint implements found in Kent's Hole, so far back as 1834, by the Rev. J. McEnery, and of those found in the caves of Liége about the same time, by Dr. Schmerling. The rudely-chipped flint implements that rested side by side with the remains of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave-bear, lion, and reindeer, in the undisturbed higher gravels of the valley of the Somme, proved that the maker of them was a contemporary of those animals. Similar discoveries in England and Spain showed that the same kind of savage people occupied the south and east of our island, and passed the Pyrenees into the Iberian Peninsula. The river-gravels of France and England have altogether furnished about five thousand of these rude flint implements; and the number is not very remarkable, if we consider their massive form and their indestructible material.

'It is useless to speculate' (writes Sir John Lubbock)' upon the use of these rude yet venerable weapons. Almost as well might we ask, to what use could they not be applied? Numerous and specialised as are our modern instruments, who would care to describe the exact use of a knife? But the primitive savage had no such choice of weapons.

* Primitive Man, by Louis Figuier, p. 125.

We

see before us perhaps the whole contents of his workshop; and with these implements, rude as they seem to us, he may have cut down trees, scooped them out into canoes, grupped up roots, attacked his enemies, killed and cut up his food, made holes through the ice in winter, prepared firewood, &c.'

Some were probably used in the hand, while others were mounted in handles, to be used in the same fashion as the stone axes of the Australian natives. One form resembles closely the stone scraper with which the Esquimaux prepare their skins. The only safe inference that can be drawn from these discoveries is, that savages of a very low order inhabited Europe during the Quaternary period.

The region from which man first wandered into Europe cannot be determined with certainty. He appeared as a stranger, utterly unlike any of the creatures by which he was surrounded. The orders to which they belong were represented in the preceding age. The horse can even boast a pedigree in this quarter of the world, in a right line, through a slender three-toed ancestry as far back as the anchithere of the Eocene period. There were elephants before the advent of the mammoth, and large cats before that of the lion; but man is without kith or kin. From his delicate organisation, however, and nakedness, it may be inferred that he came from a warm region, just as the woolly coats of the mammoth and Tichorhine rhinoceros point to their northern derivation. Sir John Lubbock does not think it improbable that he may have been living in the warmer parts of Asia, even during the Miocene epoch; and Dr. Falconer* considered that the probable birthplace of man was to be found where food was abundant and life easy, in the plains of India. Successive races of men have from time to time invaded Europe from the south-east. There is therefore reason for the belief that man arrived in Europe from the same quarter-from the birth'place of the nations,' the mysterious garden of Eden.

But if we are ignorant of the exact spot from which man migrated into Europe, we are still more uncertain of the exact date of his appearance. We can only say that the strata in which his remains are found were deposited by ancient rivers before the formation of the present valleys. The river Somme has cut its way down one hundred feet since the first appearance of man in that region; a result which must have demanded an enormous time, if measured by the almost insensible rate at which valleys are now being excavated in Europe.

*Palæont. Memoirs.

The

bottom of the valley of the Somme also is occupied by a bed of gravel covered with silt and peat, in the latter of which M. Boucher de Perthes discovered platforms of wood, with large quantities of bones, stone implements, and handles, closely ' resembling those which come from the Swiss lake-villages. These weapons cannot for an instant be confounded with the ruder ones from the drift gravel. They are ground to a smooth surface, and a cutting edge; while those of the more 'ancient types are merely chipped, not one of the many hundreds already found having shown the slightest trace of grinding. Yet though the former belong to the Stone Age, to a time so remote that the use of metal was apparently still 'unknown in Western Europe, they are separated from the earlier weapons of the upper level drift by the whole period 'necessary for the excavation of the Somme valley to a depth ' of more than one hundred feet.' The valley, therefore, has been practically unchanged since the bottom was occupied by the users of polished stone implements. How long ago that may be we have no means of knowing; but it certainly could not be less, at the lowest estimation, than two thousand years. It follows, therefore, that the antiquity of the Paleolithic weapons buried in the river-gravel, a hundred feet above, are of an antiquity enormously greater than this. It must be admitted, however, that the erosive action of the stream was greater in the Quaternary period than now; because the rain was stored up in the winter as ice and snow, and produced destructive floods in the spring, like those which Franklin describes in North America, and Wrangel in Siberia. The same mode of reasoning applied to the implements found in the ancient river-gravels of England, such as those of Dartford Heath, or those which crown the foreland cliffs in the Isle of Wight, leads to a similar conclusion. The high antiquity of man in Europe may also be inferred from the extinction of several animals which are associated with his implements, and the banishment of others, which could only have been brought about by changes in the conditions of life that according to our experience must have been very slow. We are therefore justified in referring man's appearance in Europe to a very remote period; but not to any date that can be represented by the historical unit of years. In Prehistoric archæology, as in geology, the question of time is merely the relation of one change to another. Man, therefore, can only be said to have lived in Europe before certain well-ascertained changes took place, that would necessarily demand a very long time.

Sir John Lubbock admits one only of the many alleged

cases of the association of the bones of men with those of the extinct mammalia in the river-gravels. In 1868, M. Bertrand discovered a human skull and bones in the valley of the Seine at Clichy, along with the remains of mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, horse, ox, and stag. The skull was long and very thick, with simple sutures. These two last characters are only found in the present day among savage tribes unaccustomed to the use of a head covering, and with simple, poorly developed brains. The leg-bone was peculiarly flattened laterally, and of the type known as platycnemic. This form is unknown among any savages now on the face of the earth, although it occurs in certain interments of which presently we shall have occasion to speak. Dr. Hamy* gives many other instances of human bones being found in the river-gravels. A skull was discovered at Olmo in Central Italy, under similar conditions to that in the valley of the Seine, and, like it, was of the long type. With this exception, we prefer to follow the caution of Sir John Lubbock, than to admit the other instances cited by M. Hamy, which are more or less doubtful. M. Hamy, however, rejects the celebrated jaw found at Moulin Quignon, and prefers to follow the verdict of the English, rather than that of the French savants.

Nor is there any room for astonishment that the bones of man should be very rare in the Quaternary gravel beds:—

'So far' (writes Sir John Lubbock) as the drift of St. Acheul is concerned, the difficulty will altogether disappear, if we remember that no trace has ever been found of any animal as small as man. The larger and more solid bones of the elephant and rhinoceros, the ox, horse, and stag remain, but every vestige of the smaller bones has perished. No one supposes that this scanty list fairly represents the mammalian fauna of this time and place. When we find at St. Acheul the remains of the wolf, boar, roedeer, badger, and other animals, which existed during the Drift period, then, and not till then, we may perhaps begin to wonder at the entire absence of human skeletons.'

There can be but little doubt that the numerical inferiority of man at the time, as compared with the beasts, as well as the smallness of his bones, sufficiently account for the rarity of human skeletons in the river-gravels. The vast numbers, moreover, of the hyenas at the time would considerably diminish the chances of the bones of so highly organised an animal as man being preserved.

The testimony of the bone-caves as to the condition of Paleolithic man must now be considered. The exploration of the caves and rock shelters in the valleys of the Vezère and

Les Mondes, 1869, p. 64.