Page:Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature.djvu/163

Rh as affording a certain mark of distinction between bones mixed with the diluvium at a somewhat later period and the true diluvial relics, to which alone it was supposed that these deposits were confined. But I have long been convinced that neither can the absence of dendrites be regarded as indicative of recent age, nor their presence as sufficient to establish the great antiquity of the objects upon which they occur. I have myself noticed upon paper, which could scarcely be more than a year old, dendritic deposits, which could not be distinguished from those on fossil bones. Thus I possess a dog's skull from the Roman colony of the neighbouring Heddersheim, Castrum Hadrianum, which is in no way distinguishable from the fossil bones from the Frankish caves; it presents the same colour, and adheres to the tongue just as they do; so that this character also, which, at a former meeting of German naturalists at Bonn, gave rise to amusing scenes between Buckland and Schmerling, is no longer of any value. In disputed cases, therefore, the condition of the bone can scarcely afford the means for determining with certainty whether it be fossil, that is to say, whether it belong to geological antiquity or to the historical period."

As we cannot now look upon the primitive world as representing a wholly different condition of things, from which no transition exists to the organic life of the present time, the designation of fossil as applied to a bone, has no longer the sense it conveyed in the time of Cuvier. Sufficient grounds exist for the assumption that man coexisted with the animals found in the diluvium; and many a barbarous race may, before all historical time, have disappeared together with the animals of the ancient world, whilst the races whose organization is improved have continued the genus. The bones which form the subject of