human mind has not greatly exaggerated them it has never drawn a bird larger than the dinornis or a beast greater than the mammoth.

It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole. world, of all the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things if they had never occurred.

CHAPTER II.

DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?

FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the Drift?

If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event surviving in the traditions of the

race.

If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive of it could have come down to us. This preliminary question must, then, he settled by testimony.

Let us call our witnesses:

"The paleolithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature produced glaciers and icebergs in our country; he may, therefore, be viewed as being probably pre-glacial." *

Man had spread widely over the earth before the Drift; therefore, he had lived long on the earth. His remains have been found in Scotland, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Greece; in Africa, in Palestine, in India, and in the United States.t

"Man was living in the valley of the lower Thames before the Arctic mammalia had taken full possession of

* Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 169.

Ibid., pp. 165, 166.

the valley of the Thames, and before the big-nosed rhinoceros had become extinct."*

Mr. Tiddermant writes that, among a number of bones obtained during the exploration of the Victoria Cave, near Settle, Yorkshire, there is one which Mr. Busk has identified as human. Mr. Busk says:

"The bone is, I have no doubt, human; a portion of an unusually clumsy fibula, and in that respect not unlike the same bone in the Mentone skeleton."

The deposit from which the bone was obtained is overlaid "by a bed of stiff glacial clay, containing ice-scratched bowlders." "Here then," says Geikie, "is direct proof that men lived in England prior to the last inter-glacial period." +

The evidences are numerous, as I have shown, that when these deposits came upon the earth the face of the land was above the sea, and occupied by plants and animals.

The accompanying cut, taken from Sir John Lubbock's "Prehistoric Times," page 364, represents the strata at St. Acheul, near Amiens, France.

Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 137.

+"Nature," November 6, 1873. "The Great Ice Age," p. 475.

The upper stratum (a) represents a brick earth, four to five feet in thickness, and containing a few angular flints. The next (b) is a thin layer of angular gravel, one to two feet in thickness. The next (c) is a bed of sandy marl, five to six feet in thickness. The lowest deposit (d) immediately overlies the chalk; it is a bed of partially rounded gravel, and, in this, human implements of flint have been found. The spot was used in the early Christian period as a cemetery; f represents one of the graves, made fifteen hundred years ago; e represents one of the ancient coffins, of which only the nails and clamps are left, every particle of the wood having perished.

And, says Sir John Lubbock:

"It is especially at the lower part" of these lowest deposits "that the flint implements occur."*

The bones of the mammoth, the wild bull, the deer, the horse, the rhinoceros, and the reindeer are found near the bottom of these strata mixed with the flint implements of men.

"All the fossils belong to animals which live on land; .. we find no marine remains." †

Remember that the Drift is unfossiliferous and unstratified; that it fell en masse, and that these remains are found in its lower part, or caught between it and the rocks below it, and you can form a vivid picture of the sudden and terrible catastrophe. The trees were imbedded with man and the animals; the bones of men, smaller and more friable, probably perished, ground up in the tempest, while only their flint implements and the great bones of the larger animals, hard as stones, remain to tell the dreadful story. And yet some human bones

"Prehistoric Times," p. 366.

Ibid., pp. 366, 367.

have been found; a lower jaw-bone was discovered in a pit at Moulinguignon, and a skull and other bones were found in the valley of the Seine by M. Bertrand.*

And these discoveries have not been limited to rivergravels. In the Shrub Hill gravel-bed in England, "in the lowest part of it, numerous flint implements of the palæolithic type have been discovered."+

One

We have, besides these sub-drift remains, the skulls of men who probably lived before the great cataclysm,-men who may have looked upon the very comet that smote the world. They represent two widely different races. is "the Engis skull," so called from the cave of Engis, near Liége, where it was found by Dr. Schmerling. "It is a fair average human skull, which might," says Huxley, "have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage." It represents a

It may repre

sent a victim, a prisoner, held for a cannibalistic feast; or a trader from a more civilized region.

+ Ibid., p. 351.

*"Prehistoric Times," p. 360.
"Man's Place in Nature," p. 156.