Early man on other continents.  Paleolithic flints curiously like those of western Europe are found also in many regions of the Old World,—­in India, Egypt, and Asia Minor,—­beneath the earliest vestiges of the civilization of those ancient seats, and sometimes associated with the fauna of the Glacial epoch.

In Java there were found in 1891, in strata early Quaternary or late Pliocene in age, parts of a skeleton of lower grade, if not of greater antiquity, than any human remains now known.  Pithecanthropus erectus, as the creature has been named, walked erect, as its thigh bone shows, but the skull and teeth indicate a close affinity with the ape.

In North America there have been reported many finds of human relics in valley trains, loess, old river gravels buried beneath lava flows, and other deposits of supposed glacial age; but in the opinion of some geologists sufficient proof of the existence of man in America in glacial times has not as yet been found.

These finds in North America have been discredited for various reasons.  Some were not made by scientific men accustomed to the closest scrutiny of every detail.  Some were reported after a number of years, when the circumstances might not be accurately remembered; while in a number of instances it seems possible that the relics might have been worked into glacial deposits by natural causes from the surface.

Man, we may believe, witnessed the great ice fields of Europe, if not of America, and perhaps appeared on earth under the genial climate of preglacial times.  Nothing has yet been found of the line of man’s supposed descent from the primates of the early Tertiary, with the possible exception of the Java remains just mentioned.  The structures of man’s body show that he is not descended from any of the existing genera of apes.  And although he may not have been exempt from the law of evolution,—­that method of creation which has made all life on earth akin,—­yet his appearance was an event which in importance ranks with the advent of life upon the planet, and marks a new manifestation of creative energy upon a higher plane.  There now appeared intelligence, reason, a moral nature, and a capacity for self-directed progress such as had never been before on earth.

The recent epoch.  The Glacial epoch ends with the melting of the ice sheets of North America and Europe, and the replacement of the Pleistocene mammalian fauna by present species.  How gradually the one epoch shades into the other is seen in the fact that the glaciers which still linger in Norway and Alaska are the lineal descendants or the renewed appearances of the ice fields of glacial times.

Our science cannot foretell whether all traces of the Great Ice Age are to disappear, and the earth is to enjoy again the genial climate of the Tertiary, or whether the present is an interglacial epoch and the northern lands are comparatively soon again to be wrapped in ice.