They were succeeded in Western Europe by a smaller and less elevated race, identical apparently with the modern Lapps and Basques, and in whose time the mammoth and many large animals had disappeared, Europe had become clad with dense forests, and the reindeer had extended his range far to the south, while the land of our continents had become narrowed to its present limits, or even less. The cause of these changes must have been physical, and to some extent cataclysmal; and its wide-spread and effectual character is shown by the fact that it exterminated so many animals of both continents which had survived the Glacial age. Similar testimony is borne by the occurrence of the implements and remains of Palæocosmic men in gravels and in diluvial clays in caverns, and by the changes of level and deep erosions of valleys that are referable to the close of the Palæocosmic age. The most probable agencies in this revolution were subsidences of the land, accompanied with climatal changes; but the precise nature and extent of these is still unknown; and the prevalent tendency on the part of geologists to stretch the doctrine of uniformity, so valuable within proper limits, to the absurd extreme of excluding all changes not exemplified even in amount in the modern period, will probably for some time prevent any adequate conception of them. It would be premature to correlate what is yet known of the Palæocosmic age with historical periods; but the tendency of the facts accumulated is, I think, toward the identification of the Palæocosmic men with the Antediluvians; and their Neocosmic successors, whether of the reindeer age, of the Danish shell-mounds, or the Swiss lake habitations, with Postdiluvian and still existing tribes. [Illustration: FIG. 190.—Flint Implement found in Kent’s Cavern, Torquay, under four feet of cave mud and one foot of stalagmite.—After Pengelly.]