Here modern research in the primeval history or palæontology of mankind begins, starting from the complete transformation of the doctrine of the geological epochs brought about by Lyell and his school. Proofs of terrestrial revolutions, as local phenomena and epoch marks, are doubtless to be found, imposing enough to make the views of the older school appear intelligible; but, generally speaking, a complete interruption of the existing conditions did not take place between the periods. Everything tends to prove that even in the earlier eras the transformation of the earth’s surface went on in practically the same way as we see it going on before our eyes to-day in a degree that is slight only to appearance. The effects of volcanic action; the rising and sinking of continents and islands, and the alteration in the distribution of sea and land caused thereby; the inroads of the sea and its work in the destruction of coasts; the formation of deltas and the overflowing of rivers; the action of glaciers and torrents in the mountains, and so forth, are constantly working, more or less, at the transformation of the earth’s surface. [Sidenote: Nature’s Unbroken Chain] As we see these newest alluvial deposits being formed, so in principle have the strata of the earlier eras also been formed, and their miles of thickness prove, not the violence of extreme and sudden catastrophes, but only the length of time that was necessary to remove such mighty masses here and pile them up there. It was not sudden general revolutions of great violence, but the slowly working forces, small only to appearance, well known from our present-day surroundings, which destroy in one place and build up again in another with the material obtained from the destruction--it was these which were the causes of the gradual transformation of the earth in all periods of its history comparable to the present. According to this new conception of geological processes, a general destruction of plants and animals at the end of eras, and a new creation at the beginning of the following ones, was no longer a postulate of science as it had been. The living creatures of the earliest eras could now be claimed as ancestors of those living to-day; the chain seems nowhere completely broken. The ancestors of the human race were also to be sought in the strata of the earlier geological periods. [Illustration: This indicates a vast stretch of the lost land of England, looking towards the Scilly Isles from Land’s End. All between the broken lines was once land as far as Scilly, thirty miles away and fifty miles thence to Lizard Point.] [Illustration: In old maps Bavent was formerly the most easterly point of England; now that is Lowestoft.] [Illustration: The coast of England is being slowly worn away by the sea. In many places houses have been swallowed up. Here we see the disintegrating process going on at Holderness, where the sea front presented this appearance after a gale.]