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When we pass the limits of the Tertiary Era, and enter the Quaternary, the refrigeration steadily proceeds, and, from temperate, the aspect of much of Europe and North America becomes arctic.
The most ancient of these monuments carry us as far back as the era called by geologists the Quaternary or Drift period. THE THREE STAGES. But there are marked distinctions in the relative age of the various relics referred to. They indicate different degrees of knowledge and skill; and this proof of a succession of peoples, or of stages of development, is confirmed by geological evidence.
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.
In every direction embankments supplied the place of the excavated veins. Artificial pillars were made of stone from neighboring quarries, and now they supported the ground, that is to say, the double layer of tertiary and quaternary soil, which formerly rested on the seam itself.
I let the mind roam away back over the vast geologic spaces, and sometimes fancy I see a dim image of him stalking across the terrace epoch of the quaternary period. But this is an unsatisfying pleasure.
So that naturalists in this matter, as the children say, don't count: their universal thirst for knowledge will prompt them to drink anything, down even to consommé of quaternary cave-bear.
And from their amazing skill at casting up accounts upon their fingers, they are regarded with as much veneration us were the disciples of Pythagoras of yore, when initiated into the sacred quaternary of numbers.
Gooch, after describing the physical configuration of the Cape, says that stone implements are found in all the terraces at whatever level of the Quaternary deposits. With these stone objects were found a good many fragments of coarse hand-made pottery, that had been merely baked in the sun, and was strengthened with good-sized pieces of quartz.
A monstrous plant on the rocks, queer blocks everywhere, glacial mud, figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled the ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate man still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear.
With this staff of office were picked up some pieces of ivory covered with geometrical designs, engraved with some sharp implement, stilettos, bone needles, knives, flint scrapers, and, stranger still, the remains of the cave-lion, the cave-hyena, and the RHINOCEROS TICHORHINUS, all contemporaries of the most ancient Quaternary fauna. Staff of office found at Montgaudier.
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