cance as tending to show that the religious consciousness, universal in our day, was also an endowment of the earliest and most uninstructed type of man.

The man of the Stone Age was not, therefore, as some have asserted, a sort of perfected monkey. He had the structure of a man; without doubt, he was capable of speech; he supplied his wants with a kind of skill which became improved and educated by experience—a characteristic only of intelligence; he admired beauty; he manifested a perception of the ideal; his thoughts strayed forward into another world, and, with his other religious sentiments, he undoubtedly felt a vague, strange sense of a superintending Intelligence and a moral Governor.

Does the unwritten history of this race reach back to an antiquity incompatible with prevalent views upon the age of man? Here, as elsewhere, the enemies of Revelation have sought materials for the use of unbelievers. They have sought in vain. There is more in the history of primeval man that confirms our Scriptures than there is of conflict with them. We have popularly held the race to be about six thousand years old; but our researches show that man lived with the bear, hyena, mammoth, and other animals now extinct, and some of which became extinct on the decline of the glacial epoch. It is not claimed that man lived before the glacial epoch, and the evidences of his contemporaneous existence with the reign of ice have been shown to be fallacious. The remains of man reputed to have been found in glacial drift of the valley of the Somme are in truth buried in deposits of much later date, as has been shown by Dr. Andrews, of Chicago, as well as by others. Man had no place till after the reign of ice.

* For an elaborate and accessible paper on the "Amiens gravel," by Alfred Tylor, see Amer. Journ. of Science and Art [2], Nov., 1868, cited from the Quart. Jour. of the Geolog. Society of London for May, 1867.

But it has been imagined that the close of the reign of ice. dates back perhaps a hundred thousand years. There is no evidence of this. The cone of drift materials accumulated at the mouth of the Tinière, in which have been found human remains, was estimated by Morlot to be from 96,000 to 143,000 years old; but Dr. Andrews has exposed a curious arithmetical blunder, the correction of which reduces the time to within five thousand years. [See Appendix, Note XI., p. 445.] We have no rule for the measurement of post-tertiary time which necessitates the admission of so high antiquity to our race. If we have been accustomed to think of the extinction of the cave-bear as dating back to high antiquity, we now discover that he lived with man, and the reindeer, and other animals which still survive. The existence of even the cave-bear may not have been so very remote. What are the reasons assigned for the prevalent opinion that it was many ages ago that the glaciers began to disappear from Europe? Simply the existence. at that time of quadrupeds now extinct, together with the presumption, unsupported, as it seems, by the facts, that no animals have coexisted with man except those of the recent fauna. The fact is, that we come ourselves upon the earth in time to witness the retreat of the glaciers. They still linger in the valleys of the Alps, and along the northern shores of Europe and Asia, while the disappearance of animals once contemporaries of man is still continuing. Not only did contemporaries of man become extinct during the Age of Stone; some survived to the twelfth, fourteenth, and sixteenth centuries, as already stated; the Moa of New Zealand, and the Epiornis of Madagascar, have become extinct within the epoch of tradition, as indeed has the Mammoth of North America; the Dodo of Mauritius disappeared in the seventeenth century; the Great Auk of the arctic regions has not been seen for half a century;

and every one must be convinced that the beaver, elk, panther, buffalo, and other quadrupeds of North America are approaching extinction by perceptible steps. The fact is, we are not so far out of the dust, and chaos, and barbarism of antiquity as we had supposed. The very beginnings of our race are still almost in sight. Geological events which, from the force of habit in considering geological events, we had imagined to be located far back in the history of things, are found to have transpired at our very doors. Our own race has witnessed the dissolution of those continental glaciers which we have so long talked of as incidents of pre-Adamic history. Our own race has witnessed the submergence of Southern Europe; the detachment of the British Islands and Scandinavia from the continent; the wanderings of the great rivers of Eastern Asia; the submergence of thousands of square miles of the coast of China, so that the seats of ancient capitals are now rocky islets far at sea; the emergence of the ancient country of Lectonia; the drainage of the vast lake which once overspread the prairies of Illinois; the alternations of forests, and many other events which we once associated with high antiquity. It is the opinion of Hooker and Gray that the Falkland Islands, and others in the vicinity, have formed a part of the continent of South America during recent times, and that during this connection they acquired the continental fauna and flora. The Straits of Behring may even have been cut through since the early migrations of man and his contemporaries, the mammoth and reindeer; as in some distant future age the Isthmus of Darien, which now connects North and South America, may become a strait separating them. There is no more reason in this day than fifty years ago to claim a hundred thousand years for the past duration of our race.

I can not refrain from noting the peculiar relief which

the mind experiences in discovering the means to seize and comprehend some of the oppressively vast cycles which geology discloses. Here is a geological age-the Post-Tertiary Age-unfinished, it is true-which we almost possess the means of measuring. The life of our race reaches back beyond grand geological events. We have some notion, from the progress which our race has made during the period of written history, what must have been the duration of its infantile tutelage. Nay, the records of the Somme and the Tinière, as we now decipher them, afford us a common measure of the age of man and the duration of the Post-Tertiary. The vast changes that have transpired upon the coast of China, the shores of the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world, since man has been a beholder of geological history, seem to carry us back into the midst of the grand events which we have so solemnly and wonderingly contemplated from our seeming distance. These geological intervals, after all, are appreciably finite. The discovery affords a sensible relief to the mind so long oppressed by the contemplation of cycles which lose themselves in the haze of eternity.

One farther thought crowds itself into the company of these reflections. It is a thought of the growing perfection and exaltation of our race. How have we struggled through many ages, upward from companionship with beasts, from clothing of skins or bark, houses of caves, implements of chips of flint, a vague consciousness of a Superior Being-like the polyps' sense of light felt through all its body-through all the grades of pupilage, all the degrees of civilization, all the heights of mental and moral exaltation up to man as he now is! What a picture of progress is here! How abject once-how exalted, how spiritualized, how God-like now! Is not man approaching nearer to God? How vastly less of the brute-how infi

nitely more of the spiritual! Once he contented himself to capture prey sufficient for food, as the bear and the tiger did in whose company he lived. But-oh, how unconscious of his powers! he held even then the spark of divinity which the bear and the tiger had not, and he has risen, while they grovel on the plane from which he sprang. From age to age he has learned to commune more and more with the unseen-the ideal the good and the true. He has made achievements which were once beyond the reach of dreams. Steam, electricity-what miracles do they not summon into mind? What does a retrospect of fifty years disclose? And is not man even yet on the march of improvement? What does a forward glance of fifty years unfold to imagination? What now irresolvable mysteries may not be explained in the school-books of our grandchildren? There is nothing which it is reverent to pronounce inscrutable among the works of God. It remains for us to penetrate the world of invisible things. We have already sundry rumors and pretences-shadows cast before, perhaps-but as yet unsatisfactory and unintelligible, and, above all, unreduced to a philosophy. There must be a substratum that has not yet been sounded lying beneath the confused and apparently capricious phenomena of clairvoyance, mesmerism, dreams, and spiritual manifestations. With much imposition, there is much which can not be scientifically ignored. It remains to resolve the mystery of these sporadic phenomena-to reduce them to law, and to open under the law some regular and intelligible intercourse with the unseen world. The unseen world is destined to become like a newly discovered continent. We shall visit it-we shall hold communion with it-we shall wonder how so many thousand years could have passed without our being introduced to it. We shall learn of other modes of existence-intermediate, perhaps, between