ery were always found, showing that people advanced
enough in the arts to bake brick and pottery have inhabited the valley
during the long period required for the Nile inundations to deposit 60
ft. of mud, at a rate probably not averaging more than a few inches in a
century. Another argument is that of Professor von Morlot, based on a
railway section through a conical accumulation of gravel and alluvium,
which the torrent of the Tiniere has gradually built up where it enters
the Lake of Geneva near Villeneuve. Here three layers of vegetable soil
appear, proved by the objects imbedded in them to have been the
successive surface soils in two prehistoric periods and in the Roman
period, but now lying 4, 10 and 19 ft. underground. On this it is
computed that if 4 ft. of soil were formed in the 1500 years since the
Roman period, we must go 5000 years farther back for the date of the
earliest human inhabitants. Calculations of this kind, loose as they
are, deserve attention.

The interval between the Quaternary or Drift period and the period of
historical antiquity is to some extent bridged over by relics of various
intermediate civilizations, e.g. the Lake-dwellings (q.v.) of
Switzerland, mostly of the lower grades, and in some cases reaching back
to remote dates. And further evidence of man's antiquity is afforded by
the kitchen-middens or shell-heaps (q.v.), especially those in Denmark.
Danish peat-mosses again show the existence of man at a time when the
Scotch fir was abundant; at a later period the firs were succeeded by
oaks, which have again been almost superseded by beeches, a succession
of changes which indicate a considerable lapse of time.

Lastly, chronicles and documentary records, taken in connexion with
archaeological relics of the historical period, carry back into distant
ages the starting-point of actual history, behind which lies the
evidently vast period only known by inferences from the relations of
languages and the stages of development of civilization. The most recent
work of Egyptologists proves a systematic civilization to have existed
in the valley of the Nile at least 6000 to 7000 years ago (see
CHRONOLOGY).

It was formerly held that the early state of society was one of
comparatively high culture, and thus there was no hesitation in
assigning the origin of man to a time but little beyond the range of
historical records and monuments. But the researches of anthropologists
in recent years have