The Natural History of the Human Species

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: that scarcely one fortieth of existing craters is now in activity, or about one hundred in four thousand; and yet, that there are still about two thousand eruptions in a century, or about twenty per annum. Moreover, Iceland offers a comparatively recent example to what extent a volcanic eruption may ruin a great region of fertile country. Since this was written, another devastation has taken place in the same island. BONES OF MAN AMONG ORGANIC REMAINS. For the further illustration of this important question, it is requisite to examine whether the organic remains of extinct animals, found in the soil, and chiefly in limestone caverns and clefts of rock, are accompanied by human remains, bearing similar characters of antiquity. Although, as yet, few systematic researches on this head have been made, even in Europe, and it is likely that in many bone deposits no human exuviae have been noticed, still a sufficient number of instances attest to the fact, and leave the question open only on the ground that they were accidental cases, not belonging to the same period. Donati, Germer, Rasoumouski, and Guetard, maintained that human bones had been found intermixed with those of lost species of mammiferae, in several places. They had been detected in England, t in caves and fissures, enumerated by Professor Buckland; they were found at Meissen in Saxony, and at Dur- fort in France, by M. Firmas. A fossilized skeleton, found in the schist rock, when excavating the fortifications of Quebec, Baron Cuvier, in the last conversation we had with him on the subject (in 1824), admitted that although the human fragments discovered at Cette, near Monaco, and in the caves of the Apennines, might be more recent, the opinions then in vogue would require considerable modification. tAt Kirkby, ..