Nor is there any trace of man. All the bones of our species that have been found along with those of which we have been speaking, have occurred accidentally[340], and their number besides is exceedingly small, which assuredly would not have been the case, if men had then been settled in the countries which these animals inhabited.
Where, then, was the human race at this period? Did the last and most perfect of the works of the Creator nowhere exist? Did the animals which now accompany him upon the globe, and of which there are no traces among these fossil remains, surround him? Were the countries in which he lived with them swallowed up, when those which he now inhabits, and whose former population may have been destroyed by a great inundation, were laid dry again? These are questions which the study of fossil remains does not enable us to solve, and in this discourse we must not apply for information to other sources.
This much is certain, that we are now at least in the midst of a fourth succession of land animals,—that, after the age of reptiles, the age of palæotheria, the age of mammoths, and that of mastodons and megatheria, has come the age in which the human species, aided by some domestic animals, peaceably governs and fertilizes the earth, and that it is only in the deposits formed since the commencement of this age, in alluvial matters, peat-bogs, and recent concretions, that bones are found in the fossil state, which belong all of them to known and still living animals.
Such are the human skeletons of Guadaloupe, imbedded in a species of travertine formed of land shells, slate, and fragments of shells and madrepores of the neighbouring sea; the bones of oxen, deer, roes, and beavers, common in peat-bogs, and all the bones of men and domestic animals found in the mud and sand deposited by rivers, in burying grounds, and upon ancient fields of battle.
None of these remains belong either to the great deposit formed at the time of the last catastrophe, nor to those of preceding ages.
APPENDIX.