After what has been already said, it will be unnecessary to dwell upon the characteristics of the first race of men known to us. They were rude and uncivilised, in so far as outward appliances are concerned; but they are confessedly altogether men, and in no respect akin to apes, and their volume of brain is rather greater than that of the average European of to-day; so that they must have had quite as much natural sagacity and capacity for culture, and, like the modern and historic Turanian nations, they were probably superior to the average European in the instinct for art and construction. Thus if we suppose these men derived from apes by any process of gradual change, we must look for their brute ancestors, not in the Pliocene or Miocene, but in the Eocene itself. This causes us to recur to the doctrine of critical periods, when many species were introduced together, alternating with periods of decay and extinction. Post-glacial man appears at the end of a time of sifting and trial, a time in which a vast number of species succumbed to great physical reverses. No very great number of species came in with him, and in the early period of his history there was a decadence or destruction either by the diluvial cataclysm or gradually. Out of ninety-eight species of mammals contemporary with early man in Europe, forty-one are wholly or locally extinct, and none have been introduced except those brought by man himself. Thus man stands alone, the grand product of his period and a lord of creation, for whom great preparatory changes were made, and multitudes of lower animals swept away to make room for him. According to our sacred Scriptures, this change is still imperfect, and great additional ameliorations would have taken place but for a moral catastrophe not within the domain of geology—the fall of man. If we identify the Palæocosmic men with the Antediluvians of the same venerable record, the roving tribes whose remains are known to us represent that part of the race of Cain of whom Jubal was the father, the nomads dwelling in tents, as distinguished from the settled agricultural peoples. In this case, also, the catastrophe which destroyed these rude and lawless men was that which culminated in the deluge of Noah, which may represent the extinction of the last great body of this primitive race, whose arts, handed down to the physically inferior men of Postdiluvian times, astonish us by their early development in Chaldæa and in Egypt. [Illustration: FIG. 191.—Bone Harpoon (Palæocosmic), from Périgord Cavern.]