MAN COEVAL WITH EXTINCT ANIMALS. THE CAVE-PEOPLE. -SCANDINAVIAN SHELLHEAPS.-LAKE-DWELLINGS OF SWITZERLAND. - HABITS OF THE PRIMITIVE MAN. TWO STONE AGES.- RESEMBLANCE BETWEEN STONE RELICS OF TWO HEMISPHERES. -AMERICA THE OLDEST CONTINENT. -A ZONE OF PYRAMIDS. - TRADITIONS OF A LOST CONTINENT. SHELL-HEAPS IN UNITED STATES.-A PRE-HISTORIC HUNT IN MISSOURI. HUMAN REMAINS IN GOLD-DRIFT OF CALIFORNIA. SUPERIOR ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA.

THE period and the conditions of the early existence of man have, within the last half century, been the subject of fresh and interesting investigation. The recognition of human relics in certain geological relations has established the fact that there once prevailed in Europe a barbarism essentially like that belonging to the lower type of savages of our own time. This primeval state of man in man in Euthat portion of the world existed too long ago to be included. within the historic period; and, so far as careful observation has been made, similar evidence of the antiquity of the race is found in the

VOL. I. 1

Antiquity of

rope.

imperishable signs of human habitation and the rude arts of savage life in all other parts of the globe.

Northern Europe at one period was buried in an Arctic winter for many centuries. On the summits of lofty mountain ranges, great glaciers of ice and snow were piled, which advanced by slow degrees, and covered land and sea. When at length this long and dreary period drew toward its close, the glaciers receded, and the earth became habitable, then, although a period of intense cold was long continued, there appeared many great and strange animals, now known

only by their fossil remains. Among them, wandering in herds over the region which afterwards was shaped into the present continent of Europe, feeding upon the vegetation of a virgin world, were the elephant, with long hair and mane, a rhinoceros clad in fur, a gigantic elk ten feet in height, with antlers measur

ing eleven feet from tip to tip, the cave-bear, the cave-lion, and other ferocious beasts after their kind, hiding themselves and their prey in dens and caverns. In caves and gravel drifts in France, in Belgium, and in England, man has left the indubitable witnesses of his life, in association with the bones of these extinct animals, of which whole races perished while he survived through periods of successive submersions and upheavals of land, of floods from slowly receding glaciers, of alterations in climate due, perhaps, to the changing relative positions of the earth to the sun, perhaps to the relative areas of land and sea in different portions of the globe at different periods. These people who first appeared, or the first, at least, who are known to have appeared, in Europe, were mere naked savages with an instinct to kill and to eat, to creep under a rock as a shelter from the cold and the rain; who in the course of time learned that fire would burn and cook, that there was warmth in the skin of a beast, that a sharpened stone would kill and would scrape much better than a blunt one. From generation to generation they lived and died in the caves where they have left the evidences of their

The cavemen.