facts and dry details in the study of fossils; but the leading conclusions, particularly those treating of the elaboration of the lines of forms resulting in the modern horse, the ox, the camel, and our other domestic animals, can be made interesting, and indeed juicy and palatable, to the bright boy or girl of fifteen, or to the college student.
10. The discovery of a single ammonite enabled the geologist to determine the geological age of the gold-bearing rocks of California. How indispensable fossils are as time-marks, characterizing the different formations, and the immediate practical use of such facts to the mining prospector, always interest a geological class.
11. If, as is not improbable, man was evolved from some lemurlike form, and pursued a line of development parallel to, but immensely surpassing, that followed by the lines culminating in the monkeys and apes, it is a matter of deep interest to learn the probable time when vertebrate animals in which the fore legs were used for climbing appeared; when such was the struggle for existence that the ordinary mammalian equipment did not suffice, and the brain was called upon to act more immediately, the limbs and skull being remolded, in a way before unknown, to answer the behests of growing intellectual powers, until man as man appeared. Paleontology again must be invoked, and who knows how soon, when we learn more of the later Tertiaries of Africa and Madagascar, light may flash forth and illuminate this dark problem!
12. One of the triumphs of modern geology is that it has established the fact of the high antiquity of man; that it has brought forth out of caves and gravel-beds the man of Neanderthal, the man of Spy, the inhabitants of the caves and shelters of central France and of southern England; and told us what manner of men they were, what weapons they used, the nature of their dwellings, of their clothing, their art instincts, their cuisine, and something of their religious aspirations, as shown in the burial of their dead. It is those antiquarians and geologists who began with the study of zoology and of geology who have founded anthropology, the youngest of the sciences. It is thus due to the geologist that the old science of ethnology has been rehabilitated—in fact, rejuvenated.
It is owing to the combined labors of geologists and anthropologists that an entirely different view is now taken of the origin of man. It is almost a matter of scientific truth that primitive man was inferior to the lowest of existing savages; that our present Australian and negro races are physically and intellectually, perhaps, on a higher plane than the race of Neanderthal and of Spy; and that there has been a geological succession
