the vanishing traces of
the far past for glimpses of evidence when their age ceased to be.

Some dim light falls on the obscurity from the discovery of the fossil
remains of man himself--the human bones found by Dr Schmerling in a
cavern near Liege, the remains mentioned by M. Marcel de Serres and
others in several caverns in France, associated with fossil relics of
this period. But more from the occurrence of flints, apparently
fashioned by human art, in superficial deposits, together with the same
extinct fossils of the tertiary. Even at the very moment that I write
this sheet, my eye falls on the report[20] of an important meeting of
the Ethnological Society, for the purpose of discussing this very
subject of "The flint implements found associated with the bones of
extinct animals in the Drift." Many of the leading geologists and
archaeologists were present, for the matter has become one of absorbing
interest, conflicting, as the facts seem to do, with some assumptions
received as unquestioned verities in Geology.

These flints, which seem indubitably to have been chipped into the forms
of arrow-heads, lance-heads, and the like, have been found in France in
large numbers, as also in other parts of the continent, and in England.
They resemble those still used by some savage tribes. In this very
neighbourhood, as in the cavern called Kent's Hole near Torquay, and in
one more recently examined at Brixham, they are found mixed up with the
bones of the Rhinoceros, of the Cave Bear, and the Hyena, At
Menchecourt, near Abbeville, they occur in a deposit of sand, sandy
clay, and marl, with bones of the same animals, and others, their
contemporaries. Concerning this bed, Mr Prestwich, in a paper read
before the Royal Society, May 26, 1859, says that it must be referred to
those usually designated as post pliocene, but that the period of its
deposit was anterior to that of the surface assuming its present
outline, so far as some of its minor features are concerned. "He does
not, however, consider that the facts of necessity carry man back in
past time more than they _bring forward the great extinct mammals
towards our own time_, the evidence having reference only to relative,
and not to absolute time; and he is of opinion that many of the later
geological changes may have been sudden, or of shorter duration than
generally considered. In fact, from the evidence here exhibited, and
from all that he knows regarding the drift ph