on the shores of the lake was between thirty and forty
thousand souls. "There had been many a shipwreck, and many a naval fight
on those waters, and hundreds of Dutch and Spanish soldiers and sailors
had met there with a watery grave," yet not a solitary portion of the
human skeleton was to be found in its bed.<44> Thus we see that, in the
majority of cases, we must rely on other evidence than the presence of
human bones to prove the existence of man in the geological periods of
the past. In the case of the Haarlem Lake again, there was found the
wreck of one or two vessels, and some ancient armor. So, had it been a
disputed point whether man was a denizen of this planet at the time when
the area in question was covered by water, it would have been settled
beyond a doubt by these relics of his industry, even though portions of
the human frame itself were entirely wanting. And, in reality, proofs
of this nature are just as satisfactory as it would be to discover human
bones. If, on a desert island, we find arrow-heads, javelins, a place
where there had been a fire, split bones, and other _debris_ of a feast,
we are as much justified in asserting that man had been there, as we
would be had we seen him with our own eyes. In the same manner, if
we detect in any strata of the past any undoubted products of human
industry--such as weapons, or implements and ornaments--in such
position that we know they could not have been deposited there since the
formation of the bed itself, we have no hesitancy in asserting that
man himself is of the same antiquity as the strata containing the
implements. In the great majority of cases, this is the only kind of
evidence possible to advance.

It is now well known that the first stage in the culture of any people,
is what is called the Stone Age. That is to say, their weapons and
implements were made from stone, or at least the majority of them were.
We will discuss on another page this point, and also the grounds leading
us to infer that many of the extremely rude forms are really the work of
man.

Let us now return to the Miocene Age, in which we are to seek for the
presence of man. In 1867 a French geologist, by the name of Bourgeois,
who had been searching some beds of the Miocene Age, near Thenay,
France, found a number of flints of such a peculiar shape, that he
concluded they could only be explained by supposing that man formed
them. In this case there is to question as to the age of