various localities in England, examining into the evidence for himself, and paying particular attention, not only to the question of man's antiquity, but also to the supposed return of a warmer climate than now prevails after the era of glacial cold. The book was published early in 1863. Naturally its conclusions were startling to many and were vigourously denounced by some; but it was a great success, for it ran through three editions in the course of the year. A fourth and enlarged edition was published in 1873. The book may seem, from the literary critic's point of view, rather composite in character, and this objection was made in a good-natured form by a writer in the _Saturday Review_,[135] who called it "a trilogy on the antiquity of man, ice, and Darwin." That, however, is but a slight blemish, if blemish it be, and it was readily pardoned, because of the general interest of the book, the clearness of its style, and the lucidity of its reasoning. In accordance with his usual plan of work--proceeding tentatively from the known to the unknown--Lyell begins with times nearest to the present era and facts of which the interpretation is least open to dispute. He conducts his reader at the outset to the peat mosses of Denmark, where weapons of iron, bronze, and stone lie in a kind of stratified order; and to those mounds of shells, the refuse heaps of a rude people, which are found on the Baltic shore. Next he places him on the site of the pile-built villages which once fringed the shores of Swiss and Italian lakes. Here weapons of iron, of bronze, and of stone are hidden in peat or scattered on the lake-bed. But these log-built settlements, such as those which Herodotus described at Lake Prasias in Roumelia, are not the only remnants of an almost prehistoric people, for nearer home we find analogous constructions in the crannoges of Ireland--islets partly artificial, built of timber and stone. Lyell then passes on from Europe to the valleys of the Nile and Mississippi, and so to the "carses" of Scotland. In the last case canoes buried in the alluvial deposits, as in the lowland by the Clyde, indicate that some physical changes, slight though they may be, have occurred since the coming of man. But none of these researches lead us back into a very remote past; they keep us still lingering, as it were, on the threshold of history. The weapons which have been described, even if made of stone, exhibit a considerable amount of mechanical skill, for many of them are fashioned and polished with much care, while they are associated with the remains of creatures which are still living at no great distance, if not in the immediate vicinity. Accordingly he conducts his reader, in the next place, to the localities where ruder weapons only have been found, fashioned by chipping, and never polished--namely, to the caves of Belgium and of Britain, of Central and of Southern France, and to the gravel beds in the valleys of the Somme