n to throw off its two
great branches of the Aryan and Semitic languages. These, proceeding
in two dissimilar lines of development, continue to exist to this day
along with the surviving portions of the uncultivated Turanian speech.
To this point, however, we may return under another head.

CHAPTER XIV.

UNITY AND ANTIQUITY OF MAN--(_Continued._)

"By the word of God the heavens were from of old, and the
earth, formed out of water, and by means of water, by which
waters the world that then was, being overflowed with water,
perished."--2 Peter iii., 5, 6.

3. _Geological Evidence as to the Antiquity of Man._--No geological
fact can now be more firmly established than the ascending progression
of animal life, whereby from the early invertebrates of the Eozoic and
Primordial series we pass upward through the dynasties of fishes and
reptiles and brute mammals to the reign of man. In this great series
man is obviously the last term; and when we inquire at what point he
was introduced, the answer must be in the later part of the great
Cainozoic or Tertiary period, which is the latest of the whole. Not
only have we the negative fact of the absence of his remains from all
the earlier Tertiary formations, but the positive fact that all the
mammalia of these earlier ages are now extinct, and that man could not
have survived the changes of condition which destroyed them and
introduced the species now our contemporaries. This fact is altogether
independent of any question as to the introduction of species by
derivation or by creation. The oldest geological period in which any
animals nearly related in structure to man occur is that named the
Miocene, and no traces of man have as yet been found in any deposits
of this age. All human remains known belong either to the Pleistocene
or Modern. Now the Pleistocene was characterized by one of those
periods of glacial cold which have swept over the earth--by one of
those great winters which have so chilled the continents that few
forms of life could survive them--and man comes in at the close of
this cold period, in what is called the Post-glacial age. Some
geologists, it is true, hold to an interglacial warm period, in which
man is supposed to have existed, but the evidence of this is extremely
slender and doubtful, and it carries back in any case human antiquity
but a very little way. I have, in my "Story of the Earth and Man,"
shown reason for the beli