settled, sufficiently strong indications of antiquity to justify at least an impartial inquiry; and if there is some want of strict records, there is beyond a doubt every probability that the civilization of those countries dates much farther back than the assumed period of the origin of our race. Even in Central America, and among savage nations, the varieties of language, as well as the prevalence of an existing type difficult to modify in many generations, throws back into remote antiquity the first origin of the tribes; while there has long been an opinion, kept back by considerations of respect for known prejudices, but always present, that the races inhabiting Central, Southern, and Western Europe, before the Romans swept over those countries, were not only themselves of very long standing, but could hardly have been the earliest races in possession. It remained for the progress of discovery in geology to bring proofs of this; but, up to a very recent date, even our boldest geologists, both in England and France, have uniformly declined to meet and fairly discuss cases that were from time to time put before them for consideration; although several observations have tended to show that the human race existed and flourished in association with other animals now unquestionably extinct. Among such cases, the most striking are the facts submitted by M. Boucher de Perthes in the work cited at the head of this article; but others, less clearly determinable, had been noticed in the celebrated bone-caverns of England, Belgium, France, and Germany; others, again, in the gravel of England; and others in North-America, where a remarkable skeleton of the mastodon, brought to England some years ago, was said to have had an axe and other implements of savages lying underneath some of the bones in the swampy ground in which it was buried in Kentucky. The evidence thus gradually accumu lated in various directions has at length been considered worthy of attention; and two or three discoveries, very carefully watched by competent observers, have proved that human remains exist which were not only buried at the same time as the bones of extinct quadrupeds, but to all appearance belonged to a race of men who lived when such quadrupeds were common in Europe. One of our English geologists, Dr. Falconer-whose research es in the Sewalik hills in India brought to light a large ancient tertiary fauna, formerly ranging across India to the kingdom of Siam, and who has since devoted his attention to the fossil bones of elephantine animals found in the gravelseems to have been struck by the chain of evidence submitted by M. Boucher de Perthes; while nearly at the same time a new discovery of sculptured flints in a cave at Brixham, in Devonshire, mixed up with bones of cavern animals, brought the whole question prominently under discussion. The geological evidence in relation to this inquiry seems at present to arrange itself naturally enough under three heads. First, that obtainable from deposits of mud mixed with human remains in riverdeltas, where a certain degree of regularity of deposit can be shown to have taken place, secondly, that which can be traced in caverns, where such indications of man are mixed up with bones of other animals, the whole having since been scaled up, as it were, while other deposits of later date have been covering them; and thirdly, that derived from the careful exploration of gravel-beds, whose geological age is known from independent proof, and where also the remains of man are mixed with bones of other animals-the whole having been drifted together, and together covered with newer deposit. The only case at present adduced in respect to the first class of evidence is the Delta of the Nile, at a point where historical monuments of great antiquity. exist, originally constructed on the Nile mud at a certain level, and since covered up by such a thickness of deposit as belongs to the time that has elapsed. For the clear determination of this matter, we have to thank Mr. Leonard Horner, who, by suggesting a series of operations of the simplest but most satisfactory kind, has succeeded in proving several very important points. The researches and conclusions alluded to are recorded in two memoirs read before the Royal Society, and since published in the Transac tions of that body for the years 1855 and 1858; and we shall preceed to give an outline of the result. Mr. Horner selected for the point of research the site of the ancient city of Memphis, situated about thirty miles above the apex of the actual Delta of the Nile. The date of the construction of this city is across the valley of the Nile on the parallel of Memphis, the breadth of the valley at this place being about five miles. The work was conducted in the same manner, by pits and borings to water, and always with the same result; bricks and pottery occurring at intervals in most of the pits. To test still further the general condition of the Nile deposit, as many as fiftyone pits were afterwards sunk on the parallel of Heliopolis, considerably below Memphis, and about ten miles below Cairo; about half the trials being on the east and the rest on the west bank, and the extreme distance of the east and west pit being sixteen miles. Some of the borings reached a depth of from fifty to seventy feet from the surface. Here also the soil penetrated consisted of Nile sediment, and fragments of pottery were brought up at various depths. In no instance did the boring reach the solid rock. estimated by the best authorities as hav-| were opened in a belt about a mile wide ing been about four thousand years before the Christian era. This ancient city was built on land which, from its vicinity to the Nile, must have been annually overflowed, doubtless for many previous ages, and which consequently must have been covered with the sediment deposited by the annual inundations. The alluvial soil here is the same as that presented through the whole valley to the sea; and the re mains of the ancient city are almost entirely buried by similar material. One statue (that of Rameses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks) described by Herodotus, thrown down from its pedestal, was uncovered by making an excavation round it of five feet; and eight inches below is the top of two courses of cyclopean masonry the platform on which the statue stood, whose total hight was five feet seven inches, resting on an artificial foundation of sand. With regard to the age of this statue, Dr. Lepsius says: "If we may assume that the Memphis statue represents Rameses while a young man, of which the absence of a beard would not be of itself a decided proof, we should then be justified in assigning it to the beginning of the fourteenth century before Christ. According to my estimate, Rameses Mianun reigned from about 1394 to 1328 B.C." It would appear from this that the actual thickness of mud deposited during the last thirty-two centuries can not be more than eleven feet three inches, or about four inches on an average in each century. Within an area of a square mile east and south from this statue, and in places selected for the purpose, as many as nineteen pits were sunk, and borings made to the depth of the filtration of water, every where through similar material, and the depth generally aproaching, sometimes much exceeding, forty feet. In every case human remains were met with, sometimes carved stone, but more frequently brick and pottery; and these continued, with few exceptions, to the lowest depth reached. The surface of the ground over the square mile experimented on was slightly uneven, and the difference between the highest point of the inundation of the Nile at that spot in 1851, and the mean level of the Mediterranean at the mouth of the river, was seventy-eight feet three inches. Besides the nineteen pits on the site of ancient Memphis, twenty-seven Ever since the publication of the great work on Egypt by the French naturalists who accompanied Bonaparte's expedition, it has been assumed as a settled point that the mean increase of land owing to the deposit of the Nile mud has been from time immemorial at the rate of five inches in a century. Judging from other data, and especially from the obelisk at Helio polis, believed to have been erected twenty-three hundred years B.C., and now buried twelve feet four and a half inches, of which he considers the sixteen and a half inches to have been originally sunk, Mr. Horner reduces this rate to 3.18 inches in the century at Heliopolis, and by a similar calculation to three and a half inches at Memphis. Taking, however, the estimate which allows of the most rapid deposit, and making a small allowance for the occasional layers of sand, of which there are not many, and which would on the whole produce little effect; we find by a simple calculation from the depth at which human remains are found, that we are obliged to carry back the history of Egypt to a very ancient date. Thus in the lowest part of the boring, near the statue at Memphis, the instrument brought up from a depth of thirty-nine feet of true Nile sediment a fragment of burnt pottery about an inch square, of a brick-red color, the interior being dark gray, which must have been lying there, according to Mr. Horner, up wards of thirteen thousand years.* In some places, indeed, the fragments must have been obtained from a level sometimes far below, and often only a little above, low-water mark in the Mediterranean. These were no doubt brought down by the river from the higher and inhabited part of the valley, at a time previous to the formation of that part of the Delta; thus carrying back the records of the human race to a period which under no conceivable hypothesis can be reckoned at less than one hundred, but is much more likely to have been two hundred, centuries. Mr. Horner very pertinently remarks, at the close of his memoir already cited: "There is every reason to believe that the whole of the area now occupied by the alluvial land of Lower Egypt was at one time a bay in the Mediterranean, which in the course of ages was gradually filled up by deposits from the numerous branches of the Nile not confined by artificial embankments, and aided by sand blown from the adjacent high desert land;* and that at a time when the shore of the bay had advanced, first to the parallel of Sigioul and Bessousse, and afterwards to that of the present apex of the Delta, by means of the accumulations at the embouchure of the Nile, the fragments of brick and pottery that had fallen into the river above were carried forward by it into the bay. This process appears to have continued as the shores of the bay gradually advanced northward even to its present sea-line; for in borings made in 1854, at a village about fortyfive miles above Rosetta, the supposed site of the ancient city of Sais, and also in the neighborhood of Rosetta itself, similar fragments were found at depths of nineteen and twenty feet. The rubbish soil extends to considerable depths under the foundations of stone buildings, below the lowest level of the Mediterranean, and quite close to the sca."—Phil. Trans. for 1858, pt. i. p. 76. *Besides Mr. Horner's pits sunk and bored expressly to determine the scientific question, numerous wells and borings for water have brought up fragments of pottery from a depth sometimes of upwards of seventy feet, in various parts of Lower Egypt But in these cases there was no startingpoint that could be depended upon, and the boring may have been through sand to some extent. "There must have been a time when the Delta was not only a marsh, but was even covered with water, and when the sea must have advanced so near to the site of Memphis as to allow the annual flood to rise no higher than eight cubits, or twelve to fourteen feet, at that place. Herodotus after wards remarks that it rose fifteen or sixteen cubits in his time, which was the natural progress of things, as the point of contact of the land-waters with those of the sea was removed further out." -Reauell's Geography of Herodotus, p. 112. There appears, then, to be no escape from the conclusion that in Egypt, for a distance of nearly seven hundred miles of country traversed by the Nile, between the mountains and the Mediterra nean, and across the whole breadth of the river valley, the vast accumulation of mud forming the Delta of the Nile has been gradually deposited at an average rate of only a few inches in a century; and that, certainly during a very large part of the period that has been required for this deposit, men having a certain amount of cultivation, and at least making bricks and pottery, have lived in the country. Looking back more than three thousand years, however, we find the Delta of the Nile already formed, a city founded, and great monuments of granite erected, which serve to mark the epoch. place we find this lapse of time represented by a thickness of about twenty feet of actual Nile mud accumulated; while not far off other human remains of earlier and less civilized races are met with at a depth twice as great; and elsewhere, though perhaps under different conditions and with a greater thickness of loose sand, the depth of such remains is as much as seventy feet below the present surface. In one up with In no instance have the remains of extinct races of animals been mixed these fragments of pottery and brick; so that the evidence obtained refers to the actual duration of the human family on the earth, and nothing more. It must not be supposed, however, that any rapid accumulation of mud can have taken place before the building of Memphis, suddenly washing into one heap the debris of a large district, and thus accounting for the phenomena. Nile mud is a peculiar substance, easily recognized, slowly deposited, and requiring a certain state of water for its formation. It is not, and, as far as we know, could not be produced by diluvial rushes of water, which give a totally different result. The evidence of the antiquity of the human race obtainable from deposits in caverns, differs a good deal in many respects from that just stated; for in these localities there are no data from which we can calculate the accumulation of materials as it goes on century by century. Caverns have doubtless been formed in all geological periods, and filled up at in tervals without regularity partly by their animal inhabitants, when such were present, partly with matter drifted in from the outside, and occasionally with the coats of limestone left behind after the evaporation of water. Their evidence being of a different kind from that just discussed, requires special consideration; but before coming to this point, it will be well that the peculiar circumstances under which these receptacles have been formed, and more or less filled, by natural causes should be explained. Caverns are found in all rocks, but those interesting for their organic contents are almost limited to limestone districts. They are generally natural fissures originally produced by the drying and hardening of limestone, which must have been deposited as fine mud; and these cracks have been enlarged by the mechanical upheavals and displacements to which all rocks have been subjected. Water containing carbonic-acid gas in solution, or mere rain-water under ordinary circumstances, trickling down through the limestone, has often first dissolved and carried away part of the rock itself, and afterwards deposited it elsewhere on evaporation; and thus are produced both the large open spaces of the caverns and also the stalactites and stalagmites with which they are partly filled, and on which for the most part the picturesque effect of caverns depends.* Such caverns, consisting of large open spaces communicating by narrow passages, may evidently reach as far as the mass of limestone rock itself; and the deposits have generally taken place in the hollow spaces. In some *Water in penetrating through limestone strata often becomes impregnated with particles of the composed, and which on exposure to air it again deposits either in the form of pendulous masses that hang like icicles from the roof or of strong concretions adhering to the sides of cavities into which the water thus impregnated finds admission; to such deposits the term STALACTITE is applied. calcareous carbonate of which the limestone is the accumulation has taken place near the entrance: but occasionally it has been drifted far into the interior, and is deposited in the deep and remote cavities. Among the more remarkable of these caverns are the mammoth cave of Kentucky, the Adelsburg cavern in Carinthia, the grotto of Antiparos, and the labyrinth of Crete in Greece; the caves of Franconia in Germany, and in our own country those of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Somersetshire. There are also remarkable and interesting examples in France and Belgium, and others in Australia. All of these have been the subject of description, and in all of them the essential features are the same. In almost all, the state of the air shows a tolerably free communication with the surface, whether traceable or not; and the supply of water, either within the cave itself, or in the form of subterranean rivers issuing from limestone rocks, sufficiently marks the wide range of the crevices communicating with each other and with the surface. The cavern of Kirkdale in Yorkshire was the first to which the special attention of English geologists was directed as containing the remains of animals in great abundance. Most of these remains belonged to kinds now and from time immemorial strangers to this part of the world; and on further examination, they were found to prove the existence, at the time of the filling up of the caverns, of great bears, hyenas and tigers, not at all identical with the species met with at present in any part of the world. With them appear to have been associated species of elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus, whose bones are mixed up with those of wolf, fox, weasel, horse, ox, deer, hare, rabbit, water-rat and mouse, and several birds. "The bottom of the cave, on first removing the mud, was found to be strewed all over like a dog-kennel from one end to the other with hundreds of teeth and bones, or rather broken and splintered fragments of bones, of all the animals above enumerated; they were found in greatest quantity near its mouth, simply because its area in that part was most capacious; those of the larger animals-elephant, rhinoceros, etc. -were found coëxtensively with all the rest, even in the inmost and smaller recesses. Scarce "If the percolation of water containing calcareous particles is too rapid to allow time for the formation of a stalactite, the earthy matter is deposited from it after it has fallen from the roof upon the floor of the cavern, and in this case the deposition is called STALAGMITE; the substance deposited is the same as in the case of stalactite. Stalagmites are commonly, at least in the early stages of their formation, of a mammillary shape; by gradual accumulation they become conical, and at length formly a bone has escaped fracture. On some of the pillars by the continual addition of their materials, till they meet and become united with the stalactite that depends from the roof immediately above." -Buckland's Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, p.9. bones marks may be traced which, on applying one to the other, appear exactly to fit the form of the canine teeth of the hyena that occur in the cave.... The jawbones are broken to pieces like the rest; and in the case of all the animals the number of teeth and of small bones of the extremities is more than twenty times as great as could have been supplied by the indi viduals whose other bones we find mixed with them. . . . . The greatest number of teeth are those of hyenas and the ruminantia. Mr. Gibson alone collected more than 300 canine teeth of the hyena, which must have belonged to at least seventy-five individuals; and adding these to the teeth I have seen in other collections, I can not calculate the total number of hyenas, of which there is evidence, at less than 200 or 300."-Buckland's Reliquiæ Diluviana, p. 15. ena of caverns when containing the re mains of animals. No indications of man sion was, that the third and fourth periwere recognized; and the general concluods referred to the Noachian deluge and the subsequent historic period respectively. Further investigations, indeed, fully satisfied Dr. Buckland that no universal flood of water had occurred in Western Europe at the date usually attributed to the Noachian deluge; but at the writing of his book (1821) geology was still in an elementary state, and the nature of its evidence was little appreciated. Long before Dr. Buckland undertook to describe and theorize upon the contents of English caverns, several French geologists had described caverns in the south of France in which human remains, or rather remains of a certain rude kind of human art, occurred amongst those of extinct animals, (bears, hyenas, elephants, rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, etc.,) in such a manner as to lead to the conclusion that man must have been cotempora After mentioning further details, Dr. Buckland states his opinion to be, "that the cave at Kirkdale was, during a long succession of years, inhabited as a den by hyæuas, and that they dragged into its recesses the other animal bodies whose remains are found mixed indiscriminately with their own:" this conclusion being confirmed by the discovery of the solid calcareous excrement of some animal that had lived on bones, of which considerable quantities were also met with, either de-neous with those animals. At least two tached or invested with a crust of stalagmite, and which was recognized by the keeper of a menagerie as identical with the excrement of recent hyenas. He concludes that "the accumulation of these (the hyena and other) bones appears to have been a long process, going on through a succession of years, whilst all the animals in question were natives of this country. . . . The teeth and fragments of bone seem to have lain a long time scattered irregularly over the bottom of the den, and to have been continually accumulating until the introduction of the sediment in which they are now embedded, and to the protection of which they owe that high state of preservation they possess."—Ibid. p. 41. Finally, the Professor considers that "four periods of time are indicated by the condition of remains in this cave: 1st, When the cavern and its opening existed in its present state, but was not tenanted by hyenas; this is considered to have been very short: . . . 2d, When the cave was inhabited by hyenas, and the stalactite and stalagmite were still forming: ... 3d, When the mud was introduced, and the animals extirpated: and 4th, When the stalagmite was deposited which invests the upper surface of the mud."—Ibid. pp. 48-51. We have been induced to give this abstract of the discoveries at Kirkdale as a good illustration of the ordinary phenom distinct races were indicated by the nature of the human remains; the more recent deposit containing human bones, earthen lamps, and baked clay figures, while the earlier showed only very coarse small flint implements. In all these cases pottery, worked fragments of bone, and it was assumed that the association must be accidental, and that the animals had ceased to inhabit the country long before any of the human remains were deposited. The hypotheses suggested were not always very satisfactory, especially with regard to the flint implements, which were all referred to one date, and were considered to have been the work of the inhabitants of western Europe immediately before the incursion of the Romans. The determination not to recognize any observation that should seem likely to involve the admission of an error in the admitted chronology, has lasted almost to the present time; but a rude shock was certainly given to it last year, in consequence of the unexpected result of some cavern investigations, which we must now describe. Brixham cavern in Devonshire) differed The cavern under examination (the nothing in mechanical structure, and but little in the nature and arrangement of the deposits contained in it, from that of Kirkdale, already described, but the con |