No
fairly unprejudiced man can visit the cave and museum at
Torquay without being convinced that there were a gradation and
an evolution in these beginnings of human civilization. The
evidence is complete; the masses of breccia taken from the cave,
with the various soils, implements, and bones carefully kept in
place, put this progress beyond a doubt.
All this indicated a great antiquity for the human race, but in
it lay the germs of still another great truth, even more
important and more serious in its consequences to the older
theologic view, which will be discussed in the following chapter.
But new evidences came in, showing a yet greater antiquity of
man. Remains of animals were found in connection with human
remains, which showed not only that man was living in times more
remote than the earlier of the new investigators had dared
dream, but that some of these early periods of his existence
must have been of immense length, embracing climatic changes
betokening different geological periods; for with remains of
fire and human implements and human bones were found not only
bones of the hairy mammoth and cave bear, woolly rhinoceros,
and reindeer, which could only have been deposited there in a
time of arctic cold, but bones of the hyena, hippopotamus,
sabre-toothed tiger, and the like, which could only have been
deposited when there was in these regions a torrid climate.
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