The Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 | Page 8

what
he regards as matters of established certainty will be viewed by the
great majority of his fellow beings as startling novelties.
The main stream of the geological evidence of the antiquity of man
tends to one point, viz., that man coexisted with the extinct animals.
There are collateral branches of proof, but this is the main channel. The
remains of man and of man's works and the remains of extinct races of
animals lie side by side, and claim from the geologist the same meed of
antiquity. This is the burden of the book before us. We offer the reader
a brief outline of this evidence. In doing so, we will follow the order of
Sir Charles Lyell's work, and merely state the leading facts which
geological investigations have brought to light.
In the Danish islands there are deposits of peat from ten to thirty feet
thick, formed in the hollows or depressions of the northern drift or
bowlder formation. These beds of peat have been examined to the
bottom, and they reveal the history of vegetation in those localities, and
the contemporaneous history of human progress. Beginning at the top,
the explorer finds the first layers to contain principally the trunks of the
beech tree, along with implements and tools of wood and iron. Below
these is a deposit of oak trunks, with implements mainly of bronze.
Farther down still he finds the trunks of the Pinus sylvestris, or Scotch

fir, together with implements of stone. This clearly indicates that in the
lapse of centuries the pine was supplanted by the oak, and the oak by
the beech, and that man advanced contemporaneously from the
knowledge and use of stone implements to those of bronze and iron.
Now the known fact is that in the time of the Romans, as now, the
Danish isles were covered by magnificent beech forests, and that
eighteen centuries have done little or nothing toward changing the
character of the vegetation. How many centuries must have elapsed to
enable the oak to supplant the pine, and the beech to supplant the oak,
can only be vaguely conjectured. Yet the evidence is clear that man
lived in those old pine forests--leaving his implements of stone behind
him, as he did his tools of bronze and iron in the succeeding periods.
Along the coast of Denmark, also, are found shell mounds mixed with
flint knives, hatchets, etc., but never any tools of bronze or iron,
showing that the rude hunters and fishers who fed on the oyster, cockle,
and other mollusks, lived in the period of the Scotch fir, or, as it has
been called, the 'age of stone.'
In many of the Swiss lakes are found ancient piles driven into the
bottom, on which were once erected huts or villages, the lacustrine
abodes of man. This use of them is proved by the abundance of flint
implements and fragments of rude pottery, together with bones of
animals, which have been dredged up from among the piles. The
implements found belong to the 'age of stone,' or the period of the
Scotch fir in Denmark, and the bones of animals are all, with one
exception, those of living species.
Passing over the fossil human remains and works of art of the 'recent'
period, as found in the delta and alluvial plain of the Nile, in the ancient
mounds of the valley of the Ohio, in the mounds of Santos in Brazil, in
the delta of the Mississippi, in which, at the depth of sixteen feet from
the surface, under four buried forests, superimposed one upon the other,
was found, a few years ago, a human skeleton, estimated by Dr. B.
Dowler to have been buried at least fifty thousand years--in the coral
reefs of Florida, in which fossil human remains were found, estimated
by Professor Agassiz to have an antiquity of ten thousand years--in the
recent deposits of seas and lakes, in the central district of Scotland,

which bears clear traces of an upheaval since the human period, and in
the raised beaches of Norway and Sweden--passing over these for want
of space for minute detail, we go back to the post-pliocene period, and
find the bones of man and works of art in juxtaposition with the fossil
remains of extinct mammalia.
In the cavern of Bize, in the south of France, and in the caves of Engis,
Engihoul, Chokier, and Goffontaine, near Liége, human bones and
teeth, together with fragments of rude pottery, have been found
enveloped in the same mud and breccia, and cemented by stalagmite, in
which are found also the land shells of living species and the bones of
mammalia, some of extinct, and others of recent species. The chemical
condition of all the bones was found to be the same. Quite a