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GEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

OF

THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS ON THE SUBJECTS TREATED OF IN THIS WORK-
DEFINITION OF THE TERMS RECENT, POST-PLIOCENE, AND POST-TER-
TIARY TABULAR VIEW OF THE ENTIRE SERIES OF FOSSILIFEROUS
STRATA.

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O subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the Antiquity of the Human Race, whether or no we have sufficient evidence in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift or 'diluvium,' to prove the former co-existence of man with certain extinct mammalia. For the last half-century, the occasional occurrence, in various parts of Europe, of the bones of Man or the works of his hands, in cave-breccias and stalactites, associated with the remains of the extinct hyæna, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, has given rise to a suspicion that the date of Man must be carried further back than we had heretofore imagined. On the other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt, on the part of scientific reasoners, to admit the validity of such

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PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

CHAP. I.

evidence, seeing that so many caves have been inhabited by a succession of tenants, and have been selected by Man, as a place not only of domicile, but of sepulture, while some caves have also served as the channels through which the waters of occasional land-floods or engulfed rivers have flowed, so that the remains of living beings which have peopled the district at more than one era may have subsequently been mingled in such caverns and confounded together in one and the same deposit. But the facts brought to light in 1858, during the systematic investigation of the Brixham cave, near Torquay in Devonshire, which will be described in the sequel, excited anew the curiosity of the British public, and prepared the way for a general admission that scepticism in regard to the bearing of cave evidence in favour of the antiquity of Man had previously been pushed to an extreme.

Since that period, many of the facts formerly adduced in favour of the co-existence in ancient times of Man with certain species of mammalia long since extinct have been re-examined in England and on the Continent, and new cases bearing on the same question, whether relating to caves or to alluvial strata in valleys, have been brought to light. To qualify myself for the appreciation and discussion of these cases, I have visited, in the course of the last three years, many parts of England, France, and Belgium, and have communicated personally or by letter with not a few of the geologists, English and foreign, who have taken part in these researches. Besides explaining in the present volume the results of this enquiry, I shall give a description of the glacial formations of Europe and North America, that I may allude to the theories entertained respecting their origin, and consider their probable relations in a chronological point of view to the human epoch, and why throughout a great part of the northern hemisphere they so often interpose an abrupt

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