At the Quaternary Period almost all the animals of our time had already seen the light, and a certain number of animal species existed which were shortly to disappear. When man was created, the mammoth, the great bear, the cave tiger, and the cervus megaceros--animals more bulky, more robust, and more agile than the corresponding species of our time--filled the forests and peopled the plains. The first men were therefore contemporary with the woolly elephant, the cave bear and tiger; they had to contend with these savage phalanxes, as formidable in their number as their strength. Nevertheless, in obedience to the laws of nature, these animals were to disappear from the globe and give place to smaller or different species, while man, persisting in the opposite direction, increased and multiplied, as the Scripture has said, and gradually spread into all inhabitable countries, taking possession of his empire, which daily increased with the progress of his intelligence. Did man see the light at any one spot of the earth, and at that alone, and is it possible to indicate the region which was, so to say, the cradle of humanity? Or are we to believe that, in the first instance, man appeared in several places at the same time? That he was created and has always remained in the very localities he now inhabits? That the Negro was born in the burning regions of Central Africa, the Laplander or the Mongolian in the cold regions to which he is now confined? There is a school of philosophers who assert that man was manifold in his creation, that each type of humanity originated in the region to which it is now attached, and that it was not emigration followed by the action of climate, circumstances, and customs which gave birth to the different races of man. This opinion has been upheld in a work by M. Georges Pouchet, son of the well-known naturalist of Rouen. If there existed several centres of human creation, they should be indicated, and it should be shown that the men who dwell there nowadays have never been connected with other populations. M. Georges Pouchet preserves prudent silence upon this question; he avoids defining the locus of any one of these supposed multiple creations. We, on our part, think that man had on the globe one centre of creation, that, fixed in the first instance in a particular region, he has radiated in every direction from that point, and by his wanderings, coupled with the rapid multiplication of his descendants, he has ultimately peopled all the inhabitable regions of the earth.