enomena generally, the
author sees no reason against the conclusion that this period of man and
the extinct mammals--supposing their contemporaneity to be proved--was
brought to a sudden end by a temporary inundation of the land; on the
contrary, he sees much to support such a view on purely geological
considerations."[21]

At the meeting of the Ethnological Society just held, there seems to
have been an increasing tendency to admit the hypothesis of the
continuance of the Mammalia of the Tertiary into the human era. Mr
Evans, who exhibited specimens taken at a depth of twenty to thirty
feet, from a stratum of coarse fresh-water gravel, lying on chalk, and
containing an entire skeleton of an extinct Rhinoceros, and overlaid by
sandy marl containing existing shells, shewed that the deposit had
certainly not been disturbed till the present time, so that the gravel,
the bones, and the flints had been deposited coetaneously. He suggested
"that the animals supposed to have become extinct before man was created
might have continued to exist to more recent periods than had been
admitted." And this opinion found support from other leading geologists.

That this conclusion would throw the existence of man to an era far
higher than that assigned to him by the inspired Word, is, I know,
generally held; and certain investigations, made in the alluvial deposit
of the Nile,[22] are considered to prove that man has been living in a
state of comparative civilisation in the Nile Valley for the last
13,500 years. But that conclusion absolutely rests on the supposition
that the rate of increase formed by the annual deposit of the Nile mud
has been always exactly the same as now,--a supposition, not only
without the least shadow of proof, but also directly contrary to the
highest probability, nay, certainty, in the estimation of those who
believe in the Noachian deluge. For surely the drainage of the entire
plain of North Africa after that inundation must have produced an
alluvium of vast thickness in a very brief time; while beneath that
deposit the works of the antediluvian world might well be buried. Yet
the possibility of there ever having been any greater rate of deposit
than within the last 3000 years, the recorder of those investigations,
in his unseemly haste to prove the Bible false, strangely leaves wholly
out of his consideration.

So, doubtless, concerning other deposits containing fossil remains,
whose extreme antiquity is