Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/313

Rh unbroken connection with Africa, so that elephants, bears, tigers, lions, the rhinoceros and hippopotamus, of species now mainly extinct, had left their bones in the same deposits with human implements as far north as Yorkshire. Moreover, connected with this fact came in the new conviction, forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depressions of Great Britain and other parts of the world were not the results of sudden cataclysms, but of slow processes extending through vast cycles of years—processes such as are now known to be going on in various parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand years allowed by even the most liberal theologians of former times were seen more and more clearly to be but as a mere nothing in the long succession of ages since the appearance of man.

Confirmation of these results came from various other parts of the world, especially from the drift deposits both on the eastern and western coasts of America. The discoveries at Trenton, New Jersey, and at various places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern edge of the drift of the glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific truth yet more firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American authority is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice of Greenland extended to the mouth of New York Harbor." The discoveries of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable contention by the adherents of the older view. As to these investigations on the Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries of Whitney and others in California had been so made and announced that the judgment of scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of perhaps the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace, in 1887. He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the statement that "both the actual remains and works of man found deep under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the New World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man existed in these regions, valleys have been filled up by drift from the waste of mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lavas and gravels." The immense antiquity of the human remains in the gravels of the Pacific coast is summed up by a most eminent English authority and declared to be proved, "first, by the present river systems being of subsequent date, sometimes cutting through them and their