of Melville Island, in latitude 75°. The mammoth may in like manner have made excursions, during the warmth of a northern summer, from the central or temperate parts of Asia" to the regions where their remains are now found. And it might often have happened that numbers of these animals, while grazing in narrow valleys or at the base of cliffs along the rivers, were overtaken by sudden snow storms and buried beneath huge drifts, where their bodies in time would be enclosed in solid ice, and then with the swelling floods of returning summer be floated down as in icebergs towards the northern sea. "Or, a herd of mammoths returning from their summer pastures in the north, may have been surprised, while crossing some broad stream, by the sudden congelation of the waters. M. Huc, in his Travels through Tibet, in 1846, relates, that, after many of his party had been frozen to death, the survivors pitched their tents on the banks of Mouroni-Ousson, and saw from their encampment some black shapeless objects ranged in file across the stream. As they advanced nearer, no change either in form or distinctness was apparent; nor was it till they were quite close, that they recognized in them a troop of the wild oxen, called Yak by the Tibetans. There were more than fifty of them encrusted in the ice. No doubt they had tried to swim across at the moment of congelation, and had been unable to disengage themselves. Their beautiful heads, surmounted by huge horns, were still above the surface, but their bodies were held fast in the ice, which was so transparent that the position of the imprudent beasts

was easily distinguishable; they looked as if still swimming, but the eagles and ravens had pecked out their eyes."*

From the study of a variety of natural facts, geologists have been lead to the conclusion, that at the early period when the stone implements of England and France were in use, these countries were undivided by sea, and the climate in them was much colder than at present, as cold, in fact, as that which now prevails some ten or fifteen degrees farther toward the north, or in the latitude of the localities in which some of the Siberian carcasses have been discovered. Under these circumstances, therefore, the hair-clad mammoth and rhinoceros would find a congenial home at that period in the valleys of the Thames, the Somme and the Seine, where their remains and the stone hammers and flint knives are now found lying together.

Let us now return to our argument, viz., that urged in proof of the vast antiquity of Man from the length of time which must have elapsed since the extinction of the mammoth, the rhinoceros, cave-bear, etc., whose bones are found in caves and drifts commingled with the tools and relics of Man. Let the reader now contemplate the pictures and images of these animals left in the cavedwellings of man,-their artistic style, their life-like forms, their expressive attitudes, and not omitting even their hair-line shadings; let him consider the freshness of the ivory tusks which abound along the streams of

*The above extracts are from The Principles of Geology, Chap. X.

Siberia; let him stand over the mammoth and rhinoceros carcasses still wrapped in their shaggy hides; let lim look at living wolves and foxes greedily devouring them; let him smell their flesh and handle their long and woolly hair; let him place his finger on the eyeball still in its socket, and trace the veins still holding in coagulated form the blood that was wont to course along them, and examine the half-chewed pine-leaves still remaining in the cavities of their teeth-let the reader do all this, we say, not forgetting even that they have been frozen, and let him judge for himself if the extinction of these great quadrupeds will carry him back to any very high antiquity, or if he must travel into the past to the distance of from ten to twenty thousand years, as is claimed, before he can see them browse and breed and roam among the living inhabitants of the earth. And yet this is one of the arguments put forth, under the name of Science, to overthrow the history and chronology of the Bible! Well might a recent writer in the Anthropological Review have said, "It may almost be asserted that every scientific opinion is speculative. It may be safely said that there is no opinion current among scientific men,-not even of those opinions whose claim to the title 'principle' appears most unquestionable, that is not essentially provisional, liable to modification or even revolution under the pressure of increased knowledge." *

The argument for the great antiquity of man, based

*No. 24, p. 19.

on the coincidence of his relics with those of extinct animals amounts to simply nothing-since many species of animals whose first introduction dates much further back in geological time are at present contemporaneous with man. Add to this, that "it is every whit as natural and as logical to infer the relative recency of these now extinct animals because the works of man are found with them, as it is to infer the antiquity of man from the assumed greater age of these animals. Their coincidence proves nothing as to remoteness of time in man's history."*

What though man was the contemporary of the mammoth, cave-bear, cave-lion, woolly rhinoceros, etc., so were many other of the present living species of animals their contemporaries also; and what though these great quadrupeds have become extinct after the advent of man, so have several other animals since their time become extinct. The history of the globe from the dawn of organized existence has been the history of a succession of animal creations and extinctions. It is the general doom of every species as well as of every individual to die at some time, and dying is not the work of thousands, or even of hundreds of years: it is an event that takes place in a day. The hairy mammoth and his compeers had their dying day prior perhaps to the time of written history, and other species we know have been brought to their dying day within the period of history. The Bear died out in the British Isles in the eleventh

*Blending Lights, p. 220.

century of the Christian era; the Irish Elk, whose antlers stood ten feet and a half above the ground, in the beginning of the fourteenth century; the Reindeer of Denmark toward the close of the fifteenth century; the Urus, first mentioned by Julius Cæsar, in the sixteenth century; the Moa of New Zealand and the Epiornis of Madagascar within the epoch of the traditions of those Islands; the Dodo and some other birds of Mauritius in the seventeenth century; the Solitaire of the island of Rodrigues disappeared somewhat later; and the last seen of the great Auk of the Arctic Regions was in 1844. Other species still are fast approaching the day of their extinction. "The Kangaroo and the Emu," says Lyell, "are retreating rapidly before the progress of colonization in Australia, and it scarcely admits of a doubt that the general cultivation of that country must lead to the extirpation of both." The Beaver and Moose and Buffalo of North America are being crowded in a similar manner from their ancient ranges, and appear to be inevitably doomed to the same fate at no distant period. Of the Aurochs, that once ranged over a large portion of Europe, but few remain, and even this remnant survives simply because protected by the Russian Czars in the forest of Lithuania.-With facts such as these before us, we see that the extinction of the mammoth and cave-animals is but one of many similar events that have taken place within the human period, and that it does not necessarily imply the very high antiquity which some have claimed for it, in their eager desire to carry back the origin of our race to a dateless past.