as the
Quaternary or Drift Period of geology.

The discoveries here made set men actively at work investigating
elsewhere. Excavations were made in other high level gravels, caverns
were carefully and minutely examined, Kent's Cavern, England, was dug
out to its rock bottom, dozens of important finds resulted, and the
antiquity of man was proved to extend back from thousands to tens of
thousands, if not to hundreds of thousands, of years. And the
coexistence of man with the animals whose bones accompanied his relics
was proved by unquestionable evidence, for drawings and carved forms of
these animals were found, proving incontestably that man had gazed upon
their living forms. Thus the sketch of a mammoth, showing the long hair
which served to protect this animal from the cold, was found engraved
upon a piece of mammoth ivory, and one of a group of reindeer on a piece
of reindeer horn. There were also drawings of the cave-bear, the seal,
etc., and one very interesting group showing the aurochs, a number of
trees, and a man with a snake apparently biting his heel. The carvings
consisted of the horn handle of a dagger, cut into the shape of a
reindeer, and other forms.

That these relics belong to a far distant age is proved by the strongest
evidence. It must suffice here to give some of the more striking of
these proofs of antiquity. The flint hatchets found at St. Acheul,
France, were obtained from a gravel bed which lay below twelve feet of
sand and marl. On the surface was a layer of soil, in which were graves
of the Gallo-Roman period, showing that it had been there for at least
fifteen hundred years. The time needed for the slow accumulation of the
whole series of deposits must have been very considerable.

A much more decisive proof of antiquity is given by the position in
which this and similar gravel beds lie. They are found along the sides
of rivers at a height often of a hundred or two hundred feet above the
flood level of the streams. When they were deposited, the rivers must
have run at this elevation, so that time has since elapsed sufficient
for the streams to cut down their valleys to the present depths. The
streams may have formerly been of greater volume, and had superior
cutting powers, and they may have been aided by the ice of the Glacial
Age, yet, however we estimate, the conclusion is inevitable that the men
who dropped their implements into those gravels must have lived upon the
earth ages befor