ver, connected with this fact came in the new
conviction, forced upon geologists by the more careful examination of
the earth and its changes, that such elevations and depressions of Great
Britain and other parts of the world were not necessarily the results
of sudden cataclysms, but generally of slow processes extending through
vast cycles of years--processes such as are now known to be going on in
various parts of the world. Thus it was that the six or seven thousand
years allowed by the most liberal theologians of former times were seen
more and more clearly to be but a mere nothing in the long succession of
ages since the appearance of man.

Confirmation of these results was received from various other parts of
the world. In Africa came the discovery of flint implements deep in the
hard gravel of the Nile Valley at Luxor and on the high hills behind
Esneh. In America the discoveries at Trenton, N.J., and at various
places in Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and elsewhere, along the southern
edge of the drift of the Glacial epochs, clinched the new scientific
truth yet more firmly; and the statement made by an eminent American
authority is, that "man was on this continent when the climate and ice
of Greenland extended to the mouth of New York harbour." The discoveries
of prehistoric remains on the Pacific coast, and especially in British
Columbia, finished completely the last chance at a reasonable contention
by the adherents of the older view. As to these investigations on the
Pacific slope of the United States, the discoveries of Whitney and
others in California had been so made and announced that the judgment of
scientific men regarding them was suspended until the visit of perhaps
the greatest living authority in his department, Alfred Russel Wallace,
in 1887. He confirmed the view of Prof. Whitney and others with the
statement that "both the actual remains and works of man found deep
under the lava-flows of Pliocene age show that he existed in the
New World at least as early as in the Old." To this may be added the
discoveries in British Columbia, which prove that, since man existed in
these regions, "valleys have been filled up by drift from the waste of
mountains to a depth in some cases of fifteen hundred feet; this covered
by a succession of tuffs, ashes, and lava-streams from volcanoes long
since extinct, and finally cut down by the present rivers through beds
of solid basalt, and through this accumulation of lava