er
countries. The explorations which Dupont began in 1864, in the caves
of Belgium, gave to the museum at Brussels eighty thousand flint
implements, forty thousand bones of animals of the Quaternary period,
and a number of human skulls and bones found mingled with these remains.
From Germany, Italy, Spain, America, India, and Egypt similar results
were reported.

Especially noteworthy were the further explorations of the caves and
drift throughout the British Islands. The discovery by Colonel Wood, In
1861, of flint tools in the same strata with bones of the earlier forms
of the rhinoceros, was but typical of many. A thorough examination of
the caverns of Brixham and Torquay, by Pengelly and others, made it
still more evident that man had existed in the early Quaternary period.
The existence of a period before the Glacial epoch or between different
glacial epochs in England, when the Englishman was a savage, using rude
stone tools, was then fully ascertained, and, what was more significant,
there were clearly shown a gradation and evolution even in the history
of that period. It was found that this ancient Stone epoch showed
progress and development. In the upper layers of the caves, with remains
of the reindeer, who, although he has migrated from these regions, still
exists in more northern climates, were found stone implements revealing
some little advance in civilization; next below these, sealed up in
the stalagmite, came, as a rule, another layer, in which the remains
of reindeer were rare and those of the mammoth more frequent, the
implements found in this stratum being less skilfully made than those
in the upper and more recent layers; and, finally, in the lowest levels,
near the floors of these ancient caverns, with remains of the cave
bear and others of the most ancient extinct animals, were found stone
implements evidently of a yet ruder and earlier stage of human progress.
No fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at Torquay
without being convinced that there were a gradation and an evolution in
these beginnings of human civilization. The evidence is complete;
the masses of breccia taken from the cave, with the various soils,
implements, and bones carefully kept in place, put this progress beyond
a doubt.

All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in it lay
the germs of still another great truth, even more important and more
serious in its consequences to the older theologi