Discourses : biological & geological : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley.

  • Huxley Thomas Henry, 1825-1895.
Date:
1894
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Discourses : biological & geological : essays / by Thomas H. Huxley. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    1 that life, the chalk period must have had a much longer duration than that thus rougldy assigned to it. Thus, not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud of an ancient sea-bottom ; but it is no less certain, that the chalk sea existed during an extremely long period, though we may not be prepared to give a precise estimate of the length of that ]3eriod in years. The relative duration is clear, though the absolute duration may not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk sea began, or ended, its existence, is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be determined with as gi'eat ease and certainty as the long duration of that epoch. You will have heard of the interesting dis- coveries recently made, in various parts of Western Europe, of flint implements, obviously worked into shajie by human hands, under circumstances which show conclusively that man is a very ancient denizen of these regions. It has been proved that the whole populations of Europe, whose existence has been revealed to us in this way, consisted of savages, such as the Esquimaux are now; that, in the country which is now France, they hunted the reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the bison. The j^hysical geography of France was in those days different from what it