of these primitive people with the fossil ages, the French geologists, we are told, have now “found these axes in Picardy associated with remains of Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Equus fossilis, and an extinct species of Bos."[1] In plain language, these workers in flint lived in the time of the mammoth, of a rhinoceros now extinct, and along with horses and cattle unlike any now existing,—­specifically different, as naturalists say, from those with which man is now associated.  Their connection with existing human races may perhaps be traced through the intervening people of the stone age, who were succeeded by the people of the bronze age, and these by workers in iron.[2] Now, various evidence carries back the existence of many of the present lower species of animals, and probably of a larger number of plants, to the same drift period.  All agree that this was very many thousand years ago.  Agassiz tells us that the same species of polyps which are now building coral walls around the present peninsula of Florida actually made that peninsula, and have been building there for centuries which must be reckoned by thousands.

[Footnote 1:  See Correspondence of M. Nickles, in American Journal of Science and Arts, for March, 1860.]

[Footnote 2:  See Morlet, Some General Views on Archaeology, in American Journal of Science and Arts, for January, 1860, translated from Bulletin de la Societe Vaudoise, 1859.]

5.  The overlapping of existing and extinct species, and the seemingly gradual transition of the life of the drift period into that of the present, may be turned to the same account.  Mammoths, mastodons, and Irish elks, now extinct, must have lived down to human, if not almost to historic times.  Perhaps the last dodo did not long outlive his huge New Zealand kindred.  The auroch, once the companion of mammoths, still survives, but apparently owes his present and precarious existence to man’s care.  Now, nothing that we know of forbids the hypothesis that some new species have been independently and supernaturally created within the period which other species have survived.  It may even be believed that man was created in the days of the mammoth, became extinct, and was recreated at a later date.  But why not say the same of the auroch, contemporary both of the old man and of the new?  Still it is more natural, if not inevitable, to infer, that, if the aurochs of that olden time were the ancestors of the aurochs of the Lithuanian forests, so likewise were the men of that age—­if men they were—­the ancestors of the present human races.  Then, whoever concludes that these primitive makers of rude flint axes and knives were the ancestors of the better workmen of the succeeding stone age, and these again of the succeeding artificers in brass and iron, will also be likely to suppose that the Equus and Bos of that time were the remote progenitors of our own