And these discoveries have not been limited to river-gravels.  In the Shrub Hill gravel-bed in England, “in the lowest part of it, numerous flint implements of the palæolithic type have been discovered."[2]

We have, besides these sub-drift remains, the skulls of men who probably lived before the great cataclysm,—­men who may have looked upon the very comet that smote the world.  They represent two widely different races.  One is “the Engis skull,” so called from the cave of Engis, near Liége, where it was found by Dr. Schmerling.  “It is a fair average human skull, which might,” says Huxley, “have belonged to a philosopher, or might have contained the thoughtless brains of a savage."[3] It represents a

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THE ENGIS SKULL.

civilized, if not a cultivated, race of men.  It may represent a victim, a prisoner, held for a cannibalistic feast or a trader from a more civilized region.

[1.  “Prehistoric Times,” p. 360.

2.  Ibid., p. 351.

3.  “Man’s Place in Nature,” p. 156.]

{p. 125}

In another cave, in the Neanderthal, near Hochdale, between Düsseldorf and Elberfeld, a skull was found which is the most ape-like of all known human crania.  The mail to whom it belonged must have been a barbarian brute of the rudest possible type.  Here is a representation of it.

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THE NEANDERTHAL SKULL.

I beg the reader to remember these skulls when he comes to read, a little further on, the legend told by an American Indian tribe of California, describing the marriage between the daughter of the gods and a son of the grizzly bears, from which union, we are told, came the Indian tribes.  These skulls represent creatures as far apart, I was about to say, as gods and bears.  The “Engis skull,” with its full frontal brain-pan, its fine lines, and its splendidly arched dome, tells us of ages of cultivation and development in some favored center of the race; while the horrible and beast-like proportions of “the Neanderthal skull” speak, with no less certainty, of undeveloped, brutal, savage man, only a little above the gorilla in capacity;—­a prowler, a robber, a murderer, a cave-dweller, a cannibal, a Cain.

{p. 126}

We shall see, as we go on in the legends of the races on both sides of the Atlantic, that they all looked to some central land, east of America and west of Europe, some island of the ocean, where dwelt a godlike race, and where alone, it would seem, the human race was preserved to repeople the earth, while these brutal representatives of the race, the Neanderthal people, were crushed out.

And this is not mere theorizing.  It is conceded, as the result of most extensive scientific research: 

1.  That the great southern mammalia perished in Europe when the Drift came upon the earth.

2.  It is conceded that these two skulls are associated with the bones of these locally extinct animals, mingled together in the same deposits.