The Geological Evidence of The Antiquity of Man

on the Subjects trea

he Terms Recent

entire Series of F

, or rhinoceros, has given rise to a suspicion that the date of Man must be carried farther back than we had heretofore imagined. On the other hand extreme reluctance was naturally felt on the part of scientific reasoners to admit the validity of such evidence, seeing that so many caves have been inhabited by a succession of tenants and have been selected by Man as a place not only of domicile, but of sepulture, while some caves have also served as the channels through which the waters of occasional land-floods or engulfed rivers have flowed, so that the remai

iscussion of these cases, I have visited in the course of the last three years many parts of England, France, and Belgium, and have communicated personally or by letter with not a few of the geologists, English and foreign, who have taken part in these researches. Besides explaining in the present volume the results of this inquiry, I shall give a description of the glacial formations of

pment and transmutation, which are suggested by Mr. Darwin's work on the "Origin of Species by Variation and Natural Selection,"

NCLA

g pages will be indispensable, that the meaning attached to the terms Re

d by geologists into Lower, Middle, and Upper; the Lower comprising the oldest formations of the environs of Paris and London, with other

ready celebrated as a conchologist, had been led independently by the study of a large collection of Recent and fossil shells to very similar views respecting the possibility of arranging the Tertiary formations in chronological order, according to the proportional number of species of shells identical with living ones, which characterised each of the successive groups above

second Miocene, and the third Pliocene. The first of the above terms, Eocene, is derived from Greek eos, dawn, and Greek kainos, recent; because an extremely small proportion of the fossil shells of this pe

in this place into this wide controversy. It is enough at present to remark that the character of the Eocene fauna, as contrasted with that of the antecedent Secondary formations, wears a very modern aspe

express a minor proportion of Recent species (of testacea); the term Pliocene (from

nd Older Pliocene deposits often contain the remains of mammalia, reptiles, and fish, exclusively of extinct species. But the reader must bear in mind that the te

s first proposed. The Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene periods have been made to comprehend certain sets of strata of which the fossils do not always conform strictly in the proportion of Recent to extinct species with the definitions first given by me, or which are implied in the etymology of those terms. These innovations have been treated of in my "Elements or Manual of Elementary Geology," and in the Supplement to the fifth edition of the same, published in 1859, where some modifications of my classification, as first proposed, are introduced; but I need not

tocene, or between the latter and the recent deposits; and we must expect these difficulties to increase rather than di

us strata will enable the reader to see at a glance the chronological r

. STRATIF

ARY: Pleistocene a

oc

goc

ce

CONDARY: Creta

ass

RIMARY: Permian

r old Red

uri

ovi

bri

IAN OR A