Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/34

24 reindeer on which were etched the figures of mastodons, deer, and horses. Caves in Saxony, Gibraltar, Austria, and many other places have been discovered containing human bones. The human skeletons discovered in a modern limestone formation at Guadaloupe, in the Windward Islands, are possibly of a later period and are not even fossilized, though imbedded in compact stone. In August, 1894, Herr Masclia, director of the Grammar School at Predmost in Bohemia, who has for many years made discoveries in that neighborhood! and has found hundreds of mammoth skeletons, has unearthed a family of six people—a man of enormous size and a woman and her children—near to the remains of mammoths; this is said to be the furthest northeast that primeval man has been discovered with the bones of antediluvian animals. It is a pity that more exact information upon certain interesting points has not come to hand. It is equally a pity that all such treasures of the ancestry of our race should not be preserved and indeed systematically sought for by professional scientists and archæologists, for we know how those at Mentone have been ruined and altered and their ornaments removed by the peasant Abbo and his workmen before competent judges have had any chance of observing the several different points of interest that seem to require even more than the knowledge of the anatomist and osteologist. These remains at Predmost and the men whose bones have been discovered at Mentone must have been coeval with the animals of either the Miocene, Pliocene, or Glacial periods. But as late as the Glacial period the bones have been discovered of mammoth and of extinct species of lions, bears, rhinoceros, hyenas, reindeer, Irish elk, and of the Bos primigenius, animals that had also existed in the two earlier periods, and with whose bones flint instruments have been in different places discovered in fluviatile gravels and in caves. This, however, only proves that man lived either during or just previous to the Glacial period, the latest at which these animals existed. Till, however, the bones of man or his flint instruments can be found with the bones of some animal that became extinct before the Glacial period, we can not place him at any earlier date.

If, however, man existed before or during the Glacial period, it is strange that there should be no tradition of such a change taking place on the earth's surface. It may be that the alteration in temperature was so gradual, and extended over such a great length of time, that the generations of men who succeeded each other were unaware of it; perhaps, too, almost imperceptibly to themselves, the then existing races of men moved gradually to warmer regions, keeping pace with the advance of cold, which we must, in reasoning thus, suppose to have been so gradual that at any rate nomadic races would not have noticed it by their