history of our race is so vast, so
incredibly enormous, that we have ample space for such a territory, so
widespread, so enduring, as we have seen demanded by the position of the
cromlechs and standing stones; more than that, so overwhelming are the
distances in the dark backward and abysm of time, to which we must now
carry the dawn of human history, that the time needed for the building
of the cromlechs may seem quite recent and insignificant, in view of the
mightier past, stretching back through geologic ages. The nineteenth
century may well be called the age of resurrection, when long-forgotten
epochs of man were born again into our knowledge. We can carry back that
knowledge now to the early Miocene period, to which belong the human
relics found by the Abbe Bourgeois on the uplands of Thenay, in central
France; and no one believes that the early Miocene age can be as recent
as a million years ago. A vast space separates the Thenay relics from
the later traces of man found in Pliocene sands with the bones of the
archaic meridional elephant,--at a date when the German ocean was a
forest, full of southern trees and huge beasts now long since departed
from the earth. A period hardly less vast must separate these from the
close of the glacial age, when man roamed the plains of Europe, and
sketched the herds of mammoths as they cropped the leaves. That huge
beast, too, has long since departed into the abyss; but man the artist,
who recorded the massive outline, the huge bossed forehead, the
formidable bulk of the shaggy arctic elephant, engraved in firm lines on
a fragment of its tusk,--man still remains. Man was present when
rhinoceros and elephant were as common in Britain as they are to-day in
Southern India or Borneo; when the hippopotamus was as much at home in
the waters of the Thames as in the Nile and Niger; when huge bears like
the grizzly of the Rockies, cave-lions and sabre-toothed tigers lurked
in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.

We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
boundless ages, geologic epochs of human hi