Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/366

352 In such Quaternary gravels and caverns mingled with the bones of numerous extinct species of animals, such as the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, and the cave-bear and others, human bones have been discovered, although comparatively rarely, while the implements and objects of man's fabrication are found in large quantities. They are, however, all made of stone, or of the horns and bones of animals. Such human remains as have been discovered show man at this earliest epoch to have been possessed of a cranial development quite equal to the average now. Already the anthropologists have been able to establish the existence of at least three different races, named, from the localities in which the skulls have been discovered, the races of Canstadt, of Cro-Magnon, and of Furfooz—caverns situated respectively in Germany, in France, and in Belgium. But implements and weapons of undoubted human workmanship are as good proof of man's existence as his actual bones; nor is the scarcity of these latter limited to Quaternary times. None were found, for example, when the great Haarlaem Lake was drained, although many a bloody sea-fight had taken place on its broad bosom.

Nor is it in rare and special localities alone that traces of early man have been found. They are met with in England, in France, in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Germany, in Italy, in Spain and Portugal, and in southern India; and in the winter of 1878 I was fortunate enough to discover them in Upper Egypt, where hitherto their occurrence has been either denied or doubted. Our own continent, too, seems to be not wanting in them, as within the past few years they appear to have been discovered by Dr. Abbott in the glacial drift of the valley of the Delaware. The field is vast and the laborers have been few, but their numbers are rapidly increasing; and, as extended research has been constantly rewarded by repeated discovery, we have every reason to expect that there are most important results yet to be reached, both on this continent and in the almost unexplored regions of Asia, the acknowledged cradle of the human race, where thus far only slight traces of early man have been met with.

But though the antiquity of man is admitted, and the fact of his coexistence with extinct animals during the Quaternary period can not be denied, yet both the duration of the Quaternary period and the question of his existence in the previous Tertiary age are still stoutly contested. The proofs of his presence in Tertiary times are as yet "few and far between," and the believers in his existence at that remote epoch are by no means numerous; still, as History so oft repeats herself, it may well happen that the late Abbé Bourgeois, of Pontlevoy, who has been thus far the principal champion of the Tertiary man, may share in the eyes of posterity in the well-merited honors of Boucher de Perthes, of Abbeville, who first established the existence of "the fossil man." Whether the duration of Quaternary times extends over a period of one hundred thousand years or more, or twenty thousand, or