Neolithic man.  The wild Paleolithic men vanished from Europe with the wild beasts which they hunted, and their place was taken by tribes, perhaps from Asia, of a higher culture.  The remains of Neolithic man are found, much as are those of the North American Indians, upon or near the surface, in burial mounds, in shell heaps (the refuse heaps of their settlements), in peat bogs, caves, recent flood-plain deposits, and in the beds of lakes near shore where they sometimes built their dwellings upon piles.

The successive stages in European culture are well displayed in the peat bogs of Denmark.  The lowest layers contain the polished stone implements of Neolithic man, along with remains of the scotch Fir.  Above are oak trunks with implements of bronze, while the higher layers hold iron weapons and the remains of a beech forest.

Neolithic man in Europe had learned to make pottery, to spin and weave linen, to hew timbers and build boats, and to grow wheat and barley.  The dog, horse, ox, sheep, goat, and hog had been domesticated, and, as these species are not known to have existed before in Europe, it is a fair inference that they were brought by man from another continent of the Old World.  Neolithic man knew nothing of the art of extracting the metals from their ores, nor had he a written language.

The Neolithic stage of culture passes by insensible gradations into that of the age of bronze, and thus into the Recent epoch.

In the Recent epoch the progress of man in language, in social organization, in the arts of life, in morals and religion, has left ample records which are for other sciences than ours to read; here, therefore, geology gives place to archaeology and history.

Our brief study of the outlines of geology has given us, it is hoped, some great and lasting good.  To conceive a past so different from the present has stimulated the imagination, and to follow the inferences by which the conclusions of our science have been reached has exercised one of the noblest faculties of the mind,—­the reason.  We have learned to look on nature in new ways:  every landscape, every pebble now has a meaning and tells something of its origin and history, while plants and animals have a closer interest since we have traced the long lines of their descent.  The narrow horizons of human life have been broken through, and we have caught glimpses of that immeasurable reach of time in which nebulae and suns and planets run their courses.  Moreover, we have learned something of that orderly and world-embracing progress by which the once uninhabitable globe has come to be man’s well-appointed home, and life appearing in the lowliest forms has steadily developed higher and still higher types.  Seeing this process enter human history and lift our race continually to loftier levels, we find reason to believe that the onward, upward movement of the geological past is the manifestation of the same wise Power which makes for righteousness and good and that this unceasing purpose will still lead on to nobler ends.