Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/74

64 old-school geologists have found it much, more convenient to ignore than to answer it.

Then, lastly, the same observations apply to the abundant evidence which Quaternary geology has supplied that man was living before the mammoth and its compeers were all destroyed. The spirited outline of a living mammoth has been left to us by some incipient Landseer of a not very ancient world. The consequences which are involved in this fact were long evaded—never faced or followed—just as the consequences were long evaded of marine gravels heaped upon the tops or the high flanks of our existing mountains. When palæolithic implements were first discovered, not' many years ago, both the religious and the agnostic world were fluttered and excited. The one hoped for, and the other feared, the establishment of some hitherto undreamed-of antiquity for man. Both of them forgot that those old implements have, intellectually as well as physically, a double edge. They may serve to establish the extreme recency of some great convulsion—far more than they tend to prove the extreme antiquity of the creatures affected by it. With an instinctive dread of this alternative, vigorous attempts have been made to treat all implement-bearing gravels as fluviatile—the work of existing rivers and the spoil of existing water-sheds. It has been felt that indefinite drafts might then be drawn upon the bank of time—because the implement-bearing gravels are often at high levels, and existing rivers must have been at work for some indefinite number of ages to cut their way down to the present lower channels. But again these attempts have broken down. Human implements—it is confessed—have now been found abundantly in gravels which must have been at least spread and redistributed not by rivers, but by the sea. Moreover, it is admitted that the old implement-bearing gravels often exhibit the marks of "tumultuous action." Thus all along the line Quaternary geology has established not only the possibility, but the certainty, of many of those events which Prof. Huxley presumes to denounce as "particularly absurd." Every year is opening up some new vista through the thick clouds which envelop the Quaternary ages. Prof. Prestwich may almost be said to be the father of this geology in England. No one man has done so much for it; no one has been so minute and laborious in research, or so careful and conscientious in reasoning on its facts. The very last result he has arrived at is the probable discovery of the lowest stratum, or the base bed, of the Quaternary series in England. And what is it? It is a thick bed of marine gravel overlying an old terrestrial surface on which now extinct