Rude and superstitious
as may have been the savage of that remote era, he still deserved,
by cherishing the hopes of a hereafter, the epithet of 'noble,'
which Dryden gave to what he seems to have pictured to himself as
the primitive condition of our race:
'As Nature first made man,
When wild in woods the noble savage ran.'
The remainder of the book, so far as it relates to the evidences of
man's antiquity, is mainly occupied with the consideration of the
glacial period, in its relation to the indications of man's first
appearance in Europe. It bears evidence throughout of the hand of a
master. The gigantic phenomena and wonderful agencies of that marvellous
period in geological history--its vast icefields and glaciers, with
their movements, drifts, and denudations--its coast ice and glacial
lakes and rivers--the risings and sinkings of level of islands and
continents, are all considered and discussed in a thoroughly intelligent
and scholarly manner. And here, also, amid the debris of this
far-distant and inhospitable era, has man left the traces of his
existence, as indubitably, according to Sir Charles Lyell, as the great
icebergs themselves.
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