Page:Biographies of Scientific Men.djvu/149

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LYELL
111

several valleys in France and England stone implements of a rude type, showing that man co-existed with the mammoth and other extinct quadrupeds." "The alluvial and marine deposits of the Palaeolithic age, the earliest to which any vestiges of man have yet been traced back, belong to a time when the physical geography of Europe differed in a marked degree from that now prevailing. . . . Among the general of extinct quadrupeds most frequently met with in England, France, Germany, and other parts of Europe, are the elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus, horse, great Irish deer, bear, tiger, and hyæna.

The first portion of The Antiquity of Man is devoted to the "geological memorials of man"—his bones, implements, etc., proving that he was an inventive animal even in these early ages of the world; the second portion is on the glacial epoch, and bears strictly on the question whether primitive man is pre-glacial or post-glacial; and the third and final portion treats of the " origin of species," and "man's place in nature."

The book altered public opinion as to the duration of the human race upon the earth. In the same work, Lyell threw in his lot with Darwin on the origin of species by natural selection, although with reservations, for "he never wholly accepted the inclusion of man."

In 1871 Lyell published his Student's Elements of Geology, and in this and his other books, which have