To complete the
connection 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.
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