dirt, and other material picked up in the travels of the glacier across the country. The Rhine, the Rhone, and the Danube in Europe, and the St. Lawrence, the Connecticut, and the Mississippi in America, all flow through valleys lined with cliffs of loess. These accumulations overlying the coarser sands and gravels, and conforming to the river valleys, have been measured in the case of the Rhine, and were found to be about eight hundred feet in depth. It is unreasonable to suppose that these deposits being, as they are, material thrown down out of the water after the rivers had lost their transporting power, could have accumulated at a greater rate than that now going on in the rivers, such as the Mississippi and the Nile, to-day, and if this was the case, these deposits must have taken no less than three hundred and twenty-five thousand years to form. Inasmuch as this work was all done during the Champlain period, this figure can be safely taken as the minimum for the measure of the duration of that time.

Arriving now at the recent period of Quaternary time, we find in Europe evidences of a very short and less intense period of cold; in the remains of the reindeer and other Arctic animals in southern France. Associated with these, although of a later period, we find the bones of the cave bear, hyena, and lion, and in many of the localities intimately associated with these are the bones of man. In fact, since the first discovery of the paleolithic implements in the gravels of the Somme, there have been almost countless finds of human remains in England, France, Belgium, Spain, Italy, and Greece, in Europe; Algiers, Morocco, Egypt, and Natal, in Africa; in China, Japan, India, Syria, and Palestine, in Asia; in Brazil and Argentina in South America, and in no less than ten States of this country, associated with stone implements or paleoliths, and all of which, dating from the beginning of the Quaternary period, have established the certainty of human existence during the entire Quaternary era, beyond the possibility of doubt.

The evidences of the existence of the human species during Tertiary time are many, and hardly a year goes by without adding another discovery of human remains in the deposits belonging to this period. To begin with, the existence of man so generally and widely distributed as we find him to be at the beginning of the Quaternary period, is almost prima facie evidence of his occupation of the earth for some time previous. With the means of communication and the motives for it, such as they must have been at this remote period, we know that thousands of years would have been required to scatter any species all over the earth, as we have seen that man was from the locations of the remains found. Further than this, there are three well-authenticated cases where the bones of Tertiary animals have been found, upon which there were cuts made by edged tools, which could have been made only by human agency. Since these have been discovered, crude implements as well as human bones have been found in no less than a dozen places in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which attest, beyond doubt, to man’s having existed since the Middle Miocene or early Pliocene time. We not only have the opinions of such authorities as Rames, Hamy, Mortillet, Quatrefages, and Delauney, to accept in this matter, but the more recent thorough investigations of Laing and Haeckel.

Turning now from geological evidence to that founded upon other observations, as to the length of time man has been an inhabitant of the earth, perhaps one of the most interesting discoveries was that of the Tumuli or mounds of shells of such animals as the oyster, cockle, limpet, etc., and, along with this, the bones of birds, wild animals, and fish, together with stone implements and rude pottery. These kitchen-middens were first discovered in Denmark, but they have since been found in many countries where savages have lived along the coast. In many of the Swiss lakes, such as Zurich and Neufchatel, there have been found piles driven into the ground, around which, in dredging, human bones, as well as stone implements, have been brought up, and which are now known to have been the dwelling-places and remains of prehistoric peoples, who located in this manner so as to protect themselves from prowling wild animals and from their savage neighbors. From the amount and character of these deposits, we are forced to assume that the habitations were used for a long period, and from geological computation of the time required to deposit the silt around these piles in the Swiss Lake-villages, and from the similarity of the remains in the Danish peat-mosses and the kitchen-middens no period could be assigned to their antiquity of less than seven thousand years.

Our earliest record of historic man is found in the Valley of the Nile, where we can say with certainty that, over seven thousand years ago, there existed a high state of civilization under the old Egyptian Empire. Menes was the first recorded king who sat on the throne, and during the six dynasties of kings which composed this period, we see the rise to supremacy of Memphis, the building of the pyramids, the accumulation of a varied and extensive literature, and the perfection of the industrial and fine arts. In fact, so faithfully and indestructibly were the lines of human faces reproduced upon stone and other materials, that, at this day, we have no difficulty in identifying the different races of men from their resemblance at the present time. Menes, himself, carried to completion the great engineering feat of turning the course of the Nile so as to obtain a site for his capital, at Memphis. His successor was not only a patron but a practitioner of the art of medicine. From the monuments and papyri of the great tombs of Ghizeh and Sakkara, we have learned so much of the social and political life of Egypt at this period through the deciphering of the Rosetta stone by Champollion, that we may be said to have a very accurate knowledge of mankind, as his existence was conditioned in Egypt from four to five thousand years before the beginning of our present era. From Memphis, the seat of the government first shifts to Heracleopolis, and then to Thebes, and, during these changes, we see Egypt go back into the night of semi-barbarism (comparatively speaking), and after a long period of time to again develop a high state of civilization, under a new language and a new religion, in the eleventh dynasty. Egyptian influence extended from the equator on the south, to southern Syria on the north, and Isis and Osiris were the deities that commanded the veneration of the then civilized world. The kings of this dynasty built the famous labyrinth of Fayoum, where in the desert was formed a large artificial lake with tunnels and sluices so arranged that the annual inundations of the Nile were partially controlled by allowing the surplus water to fill this lake, and in the time of a drouth, letting it out to irrigate the valley as needed. Many temples, obelisks, and statues were erected, and the period was one of social and literary activity. About two thousand years before Christ, the seat of the government was transferred from Thebes to the Delta, and, shortly after this, the Hyksos dynasty began with a conquest by these invaders, who laid all Egypt under tribute. The conquerors adopted both the civilization and the religion of their subjects, and reigned over Egypt somewhat more than five hundred years. Their expulsion marks the beginning of the new empire, which extended the Egyptian influence from the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean, and subjugated both Babylon and Nineveh. From