Orleans County Monitor

THE AGE OF MAN.

When was man first placed on earth? No man can answer that question. Hugh Miller says that man's habit of burying his dead out of sight makes it very easy to be mistaken on that point; for, because of burial, men's bones may be found among the animals that have lain in the earth for ages. There is one thing, however, that gives us an inkling of when he came. Certain tools, that only man could have made, have been found buried in caves, in peat beds, and in the bottom of lakes. Often these are covered by layers of rock; and, by calculating how long it took to make the layers, a guess can be made as to when the tools were put there. Still, it is only a guess, and no one pretends to regard the question as settled, because under some conditions the layers would be made much faster than under others. But the bones of certain animals, the mammoth and other great creatures of that time, which have long since died, have been found with these tools. By calculating in what ages these animals lived, and how long it takes a race of animals to die out, a surer result can be arrived at. In a cave in England, buried under a limestone layer from one to fifteen inches thick, tools have been found mingled with the bones of elephants, tigers, rhinoceroses, and hyenas, which roamed over that country thousands and thousands of years ago. The peat bogs of what is now Denmark and Scandinavia are filled with stone tools. Some have been found in beds of gravel, underlying peat which is certainly seven thousand years old. This seems to show that man must have dwelt on earth at least as many years ago.