Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/311

Rh those in the upper and more recent layers; and, finally, in the lowest levels, near the floors of these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave bear and others of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone implements evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress. No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay without being convinced that there were a gradation and evolution in these beginnings of human civilization. The evidence is complete; the masses of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils, implements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress beyond a doubt.

All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race; but in it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more important and more serious in its consequences to the older theologic view, and this will be discussed in the following chapter.

But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of man. Remains of animals were found in connection with human remains, which showed not only that man was living in times more remote than the earlier of the new investigators had dared dream, but that some of these early periods of his existence must have been of immense length, embracing climatic changes betokening different geological periods: for with remains of fire and human implements and human bones were found not only bones of the hairy mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros and reindeer, which could only have been deposited there in a time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus, saber-toothed tiger, and the like, which could only have been deposited when there was in these regions a torrid climate. The conjunction of these remains clearly showed that man had lived in England early enough and long enough to pass through times when there was arctic cold and times when there was torrid heat; times when great glaciers stretched far down into England and indeed into the continent, and times when England had a land connection with the European continent, and the European continent with Africa, allowing tropical animals to migrate freely from Africa to the middle regions of England.

The question of the origin of man at a period vastly earlier than the sacred chronologists permitted was thus absolutely settled; but among the questions regarding the existence of man at a period yet more remote, the Drift period, there was one which for a time seemed to give the champions of science some difficulty. The orthodox leaders in the time of Boucher de Perthes, and for a considerable time afterward, had a weapon of which they made good use; the statement that no human bones had yet been discovered in the drift. The supporters of science