growth, it would follow, if the claims of the Natchez man to have coexisted with the mastodon are admitted, that North America was peopled more than a thousand centuries ago by the human race. But, even were that true, we could not presume, reasoning from ascertained geological data, the Natchez bone was anterior in date to the antique flint _haches_ of St. Acheul." Human remains have since been found in the United States, both in the loess and in drifts, which are presumably older; but even if this were doubtful, the evidence would remain the same for the immense time required for such a deposit, and there is abundant proof in Europe, that human implements, and even skulls and skeletons, have been found at considerable depths in the loess, along with remains of the mammoth and other extinct animals. It must be remembered also, that the loess is only one part of the work due to glacial erosion. It is, in fact, only the deposit of the fine mud ground from the rocks by glaciers, and carried down further by rivers issuing from them than the coarser _débris_, which, as we have seen, cover 1,000,000 square miles to an average depth of fifty feet in North America alone. The volumes, therefore, of the loess and of the _débris_ correspond, and tell the same story of enormous erosion requiring immense periods of time. Even in comparatively recent times striking proofs of immense antiquity are afforded by the amounts of denudation and erosion which have taken place since the ice disappeared and the lands and seas assumed substantially their present contours and levels. I will give one instance which, although comparatively modern, will come home readily to most British readers. Dr. Evans in his _Ancient Stone Implements_, referring to those found at Bournemouth 100 feet above the present sea-level in the gravels of the old Solent river, which then ran at that height, says-- "Who, standing on the edge of the lofty cliff at Bournemouth, and gazing over the wide expanse of waters between the present shore and a line connecting the Needles on the one hand and the Ballard-Down Foreland on the other, can fully comprehend how immensely remote was the epoch when what is now that vast bay was high and dry land, and a long range of chalk downs, 600 feet above the sea, bounded the horizon on the south? And yet this must have been the sight that met the eyes of those primæval men who frequented that ancient river, which buried their handiworks in gravels that now cap the cliffs, and of the course of which so strange but indubitable a memorial subsists, in what has now become the Solent Sea."