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In this fifth and last section of the organic history of the earth we have the full development and dispersion of the various races of men, and so it is called the Anthropozoic as well as the Quaternary period.
According to him, the existence of man constitutes a geological period which he designates as the ANTHROPOZOIC ERA. "The creation of man," says he, "was the introduction of a new element into nature, of a force wholly unknown to earlier periods." Cutting of Marine Isthmuses.
Finally comes the Anthropozoic or Quaternary age, the age of man, three hundred thousand years, with not much addition to the sedimentary rocks. Man seems to be the net result of it all, of all these vast cycles of Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, and Caenozoic life. He is the one drop finally distilled from the vast weltering sea of lower organic forms.
However, this much is certain: the development of civilisation falls in the anthropozoic age, and this is merely an insignificant fraction of the vast period of the whole history of life. When we remember this, it seems ridiculous to restrict the word "history" to the civilised period.
II, he supports this judgment by comparing the relative shortness of the existence of mankind with the length of the preceding geological periods: "Since the awakening of the human consciousness, human vanity and human arrogance have delighted in regarding Man as the real main-purpose and end of all earthly life, and as the centre of terrestrial Nature, for whose use and service all the activities of the rest of creation were from the first defined or predestined by a 'wise providence. How utterly baseless these presumptuous anthropocentric conceptions are, nothing could evince more strikingly than a comparison of the duration of the Anthropozoic or Quaternary Epoch with that of the preceding Epochs."
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