The conclusion from these discoveries--the most important scientific
discoveries, relating to human history, of modern times--is, that ages
ago, in the period of the extinct mammoth and the fossil bear, perhaps
before the Channel separated England from France, a race of barbarian
human beings lived on the soil of Europe, capable of fabricating rough
implements. The evidence has been carefully weighed by impartial and
experienced men, and thus far it seems complete.

The mind is lost in astonishment, in looking back at such a vast
antiquity of human beings. A tribe of men in existence tens of thousands
of years before any of the received dates of Creation! savages who
hunted, with their flint-headed arrows, the gigantic elk of Ireland and
the buffalo of Germany, or who fled from the savage tiger of France,
or who trapped the immense clumsy mammoth of Northern Europe. Who were
they? we ask ourselves in wonder. Was there with man, as with other
forms of animal life, a long and gradual progression from the lowest
condition to a higher, till at length the world was made ready for a
more developed human being, and the Creator placed the first of the
present family of man upon the earth? Were those European barbarians of
the Drift Period a primeval race, destroyed before the creation of our
own race, and lower and more barbarian than the lowest of the present
inhabitants of the world? or, as seems more probable, were these
mysterious beings--the hunters of the mammoth and the aurochs--the
earliest progenitors of our own family, the childish fathers of the
human race?

The subject hardly yet admits of an exact and scientific answer. We can
merely here suggest the probability of a vast antiquity to human beings,
and of the existence of the FOSSIL or PRE-ADAMITIC MAN.