The Antiquity of Man | Page 9

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
stalagmites, associated with the remains of the extinct hyaena, bear,
elephant, or rhinoceros, has given rise to a suspicion that the date of
Man must be carried farther 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 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 inquiry, 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 barrier to all attempts to trace farther back
into the past the signs of the existence of Man upon the earth.

In the concluding chapters I shall offer a few remarks on the recent
modifications of the Lamarckian theory of progressive development
and transmutation, which are suggested by Mr. Darwin's work on the
"Origin of Species by Variation and Natural Selection," and the bearing
of this hypothesis on the different races of mankind and their
connection with other parts of the animal kingdom.
NOMENCLATURE.
Some preliminary explanation of the nomenclature adopted in the
following pages will be indispensable, that the meaning attached to the
terms Recent, Pleistocene, and Post-Tertiary may be correctly
understood. [Note 1.]
Previously to the year 1833, when I published the third volume of the
"Principles of Geology," the strata called Tertiary had been divided by
geologists into Lower, Middle, and Upper; the Lower comprising the
oldest formations of the environs of Paris and London, with others of
like age; the Middle, those of Bordeaux and Touraine; and the Upper,
all that lay above or were newer than the last-mentioned group.
When engaged in 1828 in preparing for the press the treatise on
geology above alluded to, I conceived the idea of classing the whole of
this series of strata according to the different degrees of affinity which
their fossil testacea bore to the living fauna. Having obtained
information on this subject during my travels on the Continent, I learnt
that M. Deshayes of Paris, already celebrated as a conchologist, had
been led independently by the study of a large collection of Recent and
fossil shells to very similar views respecting the possibility of arranging
the Tertiary formations in chronological order, according to the
proportional number of species of shells identical with living ones,
which characterised each of the successive groups above mentioned.
After comparing 3000 fossil species with 5000 living ones, the result
arrived at was, that in the lower Tertiary strata there were about 3 1/2
per cent identical with Recent; in the middle Tertiary (the faluns of the
Loire and Gironde), about 17 per cent; and in the upper tertiary, from
35 to 50, and sometimes in the most modern beds as much as 90 to 95
per cent.

For the sake of clearness and brevity, I proposed to give short technical
names to these sets of