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The rock-shelter of Entre-Roches is supposed to date from Paleolithic times, and if it were certain that there has been no displacement of the soil on which the parietal was found, it is to be concluded that trepanation was practised in the Quaternary period when man was living amongst the large extinct pachydermata and felidae.
In Sicily and Sardinia, which form part of a supposed former land bridge between Africa and Europe, a small people about five feet high still exist, whom Dr. Kollman looks upon as representing a distinct race, the predecessors of the tall Europeans. In the Lapps of northern Europe we possess another small race, possibly the lineal descendents of the Quaternary Pygmies.
On the evening of the same day, a yet more numerous herd passed by in the same direction, the numbers of which were absolutely incalculable, but which, according to Cumming, must have exceeded several hundred thousand. Such must have been animal life in Europe in Quaternary times. "Grand indeed," cries Hugh Miller, "was the fauna of the British Isles in those days.
At. de Mortillet estimates at more than 25,000 the number of specimens found on the plateau of Saint Acheul, the scene of the earliest discoveries that revealed the existence of man in Quaternary times; and the station of Concise, on Lake Neuchatel, which is one of the most ancient in Switzerland, yielded a yet more considerable number.
With respect to such inundations as are the consequences of earthquakes, and other slight movements of the crust of the earth, I have never heard of anything to show that they were more frequent and severer in the quaternary or tertiary epochs than they are now.
Do not the physicists begin to think of explaining to us the probable cause of changes so remarkable and so well established? We can no longer evade the question by supposing these phenomena to be due to the action of great currents. He who does not distinguish between these two series of facts, and perceive their connection, does not understand the geology of the Quaternary epoch. . .
Excavations at Solutre have yielded several fragments of yellow, hand-made pottery very insufficiently baked; and other pieces have been found in the peat-bogs of Bastide de Bearn with the bones of reindeer, and worked flints similar to those found in Quaternary deposits.
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."
This plan increases the grinding power of the teeth. With the oncoming of the Era of Man the horse reaches his modern splendid development. During the early Quaternary the horse was perhaps in some of his representatives a larger creature than he is to-day. Each foot now has but a single toe.
Along this part of our march there was much of what at a hasty glance seemed to be volcanic rock; but Oliveira showed me that it was a kind of conglomerate, with bubbles or hollows in it, made of sand and iron- bearing earth. He said it was a superficial quaternary deposit formed by erosion from the cretaceous rocks, and that there were here no tertiary deposits.
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