Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/85

Rh epoch, proofs of man's existence would still have been supplied by the cut bones and worked flints.'

Dr. Schmerling, therefore, had no hesitation in concluding from the various facts ascertained by him, that man once lived in the Liége district contemporaneously with the cave-bear, and several other extinct species of quadrupeds. But he was much at a loss when he attempted to invent a theory to explain the former state of the fauna of the region now drained by the Meuse; for he shared the notion, then very prevalent among naturalists, that the mammoth and the hyæna were beasts of a warmer climate than that now proper to Western Europe. In order to account for the presence of such 'tropical species,' he was half-inclined to imagine that they had been transported by a flood from some distant region; then again he raised the question whether they might not have been washed out of an older alluvium, which may have pre-existed in the neighbourhood. This last hypothesis was directly at variance with his own statements, that the remains of the mammoth and hyæna were identical in appearance, colour, and chemical condition with those of the bear and other associated fossil animals, none of which exhibited signs of having been previously enveloped in any dissimilar matrix. Another enigma which led Schmerling astray in some of his geological speculations was the supposed presence of the agouti, a South-American rodent, 'proper to the torrid zone.' My friend M. Lartet, guided by Schmerling's figures of the teeth of this species, suggests, and I have little doubt with good reason, that they appertain to the porcupine, a genus found fossil in post-pliocene deposits of certain caverns in the south of France.

In the year 1833, I passed through Liége, on my way to the Rhine, and conversed with Dr. Schmerling, who showed