ly established. The
bare possibility that the bones of man and of animals that long preceded
him had been swept together into the eaves in successive ages, and
in some mysterious way intermingled there, was clung to by the
conservatives as a last refuge. But even this small measure of security
was soon to be denied them, for in 1865 two associated workers,
M. Edouard Lartet and Mr. Henry Christy, in exploring the caves of
Dordogne, unearthed a bit of evidence against which no such objection
could be urged. This momentous exhibit was a bit of ivory, a fragment
of the tusk of a mammoth, on which was scratched a rude but unmistakable
outline portrait of the mammoth itself. If all the evidence as to man's
antiquity before presented was suggestive merely, here at last was
demonstration; for the cave-dwelling man could not well have drawn the
picture of the mammoth unless he had seen that animal, and to admit that
man and the mammoth had been contemporaries was to concede the entire
case. So soon, therefore, as the full import of this most instructive
work of art came to be realized, scepticism as to man's antiquity was
silenced for all time to come.

In the generation that has elapsed since the first drawing of the
cave-dweller artist was discovered, evidences of the wide-spread
existence of man in an early epoch have multiplied indefinitely, and
to-day the paleontologist traces the history of our race back beyond the
iron and bronze ages, through a neolithic or polished-stone age, to
a paleolithic or rough-stone age, with confidence born of unequivocal
knowledge. And he looks confidently to the future explorer of the
earth's fossil records to extend the history back into vastly more
remote epochs, for it is little doubted that paleolithic man, the most
ancient of our recognized progenitors, is a modern compared to those
generations that represented the real childhood of our race.

THE FOSSIL-BEDS OF AMERICA

Coincidently with the discovery of these highly suggestive pages of the
geologic story, other still more instructive chapters were being brought
to light in America. It was found that in the Rocky Mountain region, in
strata found in ancient lake beds, records of the tertiary period, or
age of mammals, had been made and preserved with fulness not approached
in any other region hitherto geologically explored. These records were
made known mainly by Professors Joseph Leidy, O. C. Marsh, and E. D.
Cope, working indepen