of the limestone districts, were inhabited by a
gigantic species of Hyena, which seems to have existed in great numbers,
so that the caverns are strewn all over, from end to end, with thousands
of teeth and disjointed bones, both of the hyenas themselves and of the
other carnivores; shewing that there they lived and died in successive
generations; and, mainly, of other creatures, of very varied species,
great and small, most of them cracked, and crushed, and gnawed, shewing
the plain marks of the powerful conical teeth of those obscene nocturnal
animals.

Thus I have endeavoured to draw a picture, vague and imperfect, I know,
of some of the more remarkable and prominent features of the primeval
earth, limiting the sketch to those forms which we know only by their
fossil remains. In endeavouring to paint their contour and general
appearance, and still more their habits and instincts, conjecture must
be largely at work--a conjecture, however, which takes for its basis the
anatomical exigencies of the osseous structure, and the analogy of
existing creatures the most nearly related to the fossil.

These forms, many of them so huge and uncouth, are well known as having
tenanted various regions of the earth during what is known as the
Tertiary Era, in its later periods. They certainly do not exist in those
regions now. When did their life--their species-life--terminate? I have
been assuming that they were upon the earth, as living sentient beings,
in the earliest age of what we call the historic period--that is,
according to the chronology of the Word of God, which must be true,
within the last six thousand years. This assumption is so heterodox,
that unsupported by evidence, it would be generally rejected; let us
then inquire what evidence there is that man was an inhabitant of the
globe contemporaneously with these huge giants of the bestial creation.

I do not pretend to offer positive evidence concerning the synchronism
of _all_ the animals I have been describing with man; but, as there is
no doubt that they were all contemporaneous, _inter se_, if we can
attain to good grounds for concluding his co-existence with _some_ of
them, it may be no unfair presumption that the case was so with the
others.

And first, with respect to the _Colossochelys Atlas_, that vast fossil
land tortoise of the Sewalik hills, in the north of India, whose
carapace may have covered an area of twelve or fifteen feet in diameter,
and whose en