Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/223

Rh at more than one level, and the ancient mounds of the Ohio, with their works of art, described at p. 39, are newer than the old terraces of the mastodon period, just as the Gallo-Roman tombs of St. Acheul or the Celtic weapons of the Abbeville peat are more modern than the tools of the mammoth-bearing alluvium.

In the first place, I may remind the reader that the vertical movement of two hundred and fifty feet, required to elevate the loess of Natchez to its present height, is exceeded by the upheaval which the marine stratum of Cagliari, containing pottery, has been ascertained by Count de la Marmora to have experienced, p. 177. Such changes of level, therefore, have actually occurred in Europe in the human epoch, and may therefore have happened in America. In the second place, I may observe that, if, since the Natchez mastodon was embedded in clay, the delta of the Mississippi has been formed, so, since the mammoth and rhinoceros of Abbeville and Amiens were enveloped in fluviatile mud and gravel, together with flint tools, a great thickness of peat has accumulated in the Valley of the Somme; and antecedently to the first growth of peat, there had been time for the extinction of a great many mammalia, requiring, perhaps, as shown at p. 144, a lapse of ages many times greater than that demanded for the formation of thirty feet of peat, for since the earliest growth of the latter there has been no change in the species of mammalia in Europe.

Should future researches, therefore, confirm the opinion that the Natchez man coexisted with the mastodon, it would not enhance the value of the geological evidence in favour of man's antiquity, but merely render the delta of the Mississippi available as a chronometer, by which the lapse of post-pliocene time could be measured somewhat less vaguely than by any means of measuring which have as yet been discovered or rendered available in Europe.