The above examples relate to the men of the older neanthropic age, the men of the so-called neolithic or polished stone age of archæologists. These men can be shown to be identical with the oldest populations of postdiluvian Europe, peoples whose descendants exist to-day in many parts of Western Europe, though they have been more or less displaced or mixed with later intrusive races. These people have gone on without any physical cataclysm, or change of fauna, or geographical or climatal changes of any magnitude, into the ages of bronze and iron and of the modern civilisation. Thus, while the palæocosmic men passed away abruptly and have left no certain successors, those who succeeded them pass on without a break into the existing populations of the world. We must, however, here guard ourselves from a misconception which has apparently unconsciously deceived many writers on this subject. It by no means follows from the facts insisted on above that there are no direct links of connection between palæocosmic and neocosmic men. The ancestors of the latter must have existed through the palanthropic period, and wherever they were living they may have had the same characters which distinguish them at a later time, and which persist to this day. There would therefore be nothing contradictory to our general view in finding that the small, fine-featured men who succeeded the giants of the olden time were in some more genial parts of the world extant from the first. Nay, it may even appear that they were similar to the Truchère race, and that still more primitive people whose bones are yet unknown, and who inhabited Europe in the early mild period preceding the mammoth age. Neither is there anything anomalous in the occasional reappearance of characters similar to those even of the Canstadt race at the present time, not because any modern men are direct descendants of this race, but because under certain conditions these characters tend to be reproduced. Let us put the case conjecturally as follows: