Among the visible and tangible proofs of man’s and the earth’s antiquity, few are more interesting than those presented in the section, well known to geologists, cut by the railway through the delta of the Tinière, a torrent flowing into the Lake of Geneva[49]. Three layers of vegetable soil appear in the section, at depths of four and ten and nineteen feet respectively below the present surface. These layers contained distinctive relics. In the first were found ‘Roman tiles and a coin,’ in the second ‘fragments of unvarnished pottery, and a pair of tweezers in bronze;’ in the third, ‘fragments of rude pottery, pieces of charcoal, broken bones, and a human skeleton having a small, round, and very thick skull.’ The thick-headed owner of that skull is computed to have lived, at the lowest estimate, about five thousand years ago. But the cone of the delta began to be formed long before the man was buried in it, and higher up the stream another cone is found about twelve times as large, requiring therefore a time for its formation about twelve times as long, unless we have recourse to that miserable refuge for the destitute in argument, which consists in supposing that causes now slow and comparatively regular, operated in former times with an incomparably greater speed and a more spasmodic violence, of which no trace remains, nor likelihood appears in the record. In a word, we may infer that, so far from the shapely order and decorous arrangement of the earth’s surface being only six thousand years old, it has taken no less than fifty or a hundred thousand years to pile up this one little heap of mud and gravel. The age of human works buried under the fertilizing sediment of the stately Nile is much disputed, but there can be little doubt, if we take into consideration the ancient fluviatile deposits in terraces sometimes hundreds of feet above the present alluvial plain, that the long-unknown sources of the mysterious river have produced ten myriad repetitions of the annual overflow, pouring down its waters to the sea through a thousand centuries.[50]