been
proved that the whole population of Europe whose existence has been
revealed to us in this way, consisted of savages such as the Eskimo
are now; that in the country which is now France they hunted the
reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the
bison. The physical geography of France was in those days different
from what it is now,--the river Somme, for instance, having cut its
bed a hundred feet deeper between that time and this; and it is
probable that the climate was more like that of Canada or Siberia than
that of western Europe.

The existence of these people is forgotten even in the traditions of
the oldest historical nations. The name and fame of them had utterly
vanished until a few years back; and the amount of physical change
which has been effected since their day renders it more than probable
that, venerable as are some of the historical nations, the workers of
the chipped flints of Hoxne or of Amiens are to them as they are to us
in point of antiquity. But if we assign to these hoar relics of
long-vanished generations of men the greatest age that can possibly be
claimed for them, they are not older than the drift of boulder clay,
which in comparison with the chalk is but a very juvenile deposit. You
need go no further than your own seaboard for evidence of this fact.
At one of the most charming spots on the coast of Norfolk, Cromer, you
will see the boulder clay forming a vast mass, which lies upon the
chalk, and must consequently have come into existence after it. Huge
boulders of chalk are in fact included in the clay, and have evidently
been brought to the position they now occupy by the same agency as
that which has planted blocks of syenite from Norway side by side with
them....

Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso
runs may read it. It tells us with an authority which can not be
impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up and
remained dry land until it was covered with forest, stocked with the
great game the spoils of which have rejoiced your geologists. How long
it remained in that condition can not be said; but "the whirligig of
time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land
with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants,
hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient
trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it
with huge masses of drif