Course of Lectures ; the sixth of which (eoncisèly, but admirably,
reported in our “ Daily Tribune ” *) bore directly upon the themes
discussed in Types of Mankind. The subjects of the present work
were passed in daily review, while the Professor sojourned amongst
us. We need not recapitulate the obvious advantages its readers in
consequence derive. Its authors and the writer consider the following
abstract to he, in all senses of the word, a memorandum, : —
“ Respecting the fossil remains of the human body I possess, from Florida, I can only
state, that the identity with human bones is beyond all question ; the parts preserved being
the j'aws with perfect teeth, find portions of a foot. They were discovered by my friend, Count
F. de Pourtalès, in a bluff upon the shores of Lake Monroe, in Florida. The mass in which
they were found is a conglomerate of rotten coral-reef limestone and shells, mostly ampul-
larias of the same species now found in the St. John river, which drains lake Monroe. The
question of their age is more difficult to answer. To understand it fully, it must be remembered
that the whole peninsula of Florida has been formed by thè successive growth of coral
reefs, added concentrically from north to south to those first formed, and the accumulation
between them of decomposed corals and fragments of shells ; the corals prevailing in some
parts, as in the everglades ; and in others, the shells, as about St. Augustine and Cape
Sable. In all these deposits, we find remains of the animals now living along the coasts of
Florida, sometimes buried in limestone as hard and compact as the rocks of the Jurassic
formation. I have masses of this coral rock, containing parts of the skeleton of a large
sea-turtle, which might be mistaken for turtle-limestone of Soleure, from the Upper Jura.
Upon this marine-limestone formation and its inequalities, fresh-water lakes have been
collected ; inhabited by animals the species of which are now still in existence, as are also,
along the shores, the marine animals, remains of which may be found in the coral formation.
To this lacustrine formation belongs the conglomerate containing the human bones
mentioned above ; and it is more than I can do, to establish, with precision, the date of its
deposition. This, however, is certain, that Upper Florida, as far south as thè headwaters
of the St. John, constituted already a prominent peninsula before Lake Okeechobee was
formed ; and that the whole of the southern extremity of Florida, with the everglades, has
been added to that part of the continent since the basin has been in existence, in which the
conglomerate with human bones has been accumulating. The question, then, to settle, (in
order to determine the probable age of this anthropolithic conglomerate,) fs, the rate of
increase of the peninsula of Florida in its southward progress: remembering that the
southernmost extremity of Florida extends for more than three degrees of latitude south
of the fresh-water system of the northern part of the peninsula. If we assume that rate
of growth to be one foot in a century, from a depth of seventy-five feet, and that every successive
reef has added ten miles of extent to the peninsula, (which assumption is doubling the
rate of increase furnished by the evidence we now have of the additions forming upon the
reef and keys south of the mainland,) it would require 135,000 years to form the southern
half of the peninsula, f Now, assuming further—which would be granting by far too much—
that the surface of the northern half of the peninsula, already formed, continued for nine;
tenths of that time a desert waste, upon which the fresh waters began to accumulate before
the fossiliferous conglomerate could be formed, (though we have no right to assume
that it stood so for any great length of time) there would still remain 10,000 years,
during which, it should be admitted, that the mainland was inhabited by man and the land
* “ The Lecture of Agassiz ; ” Mobile Daily Tribune, April 14, 1853.
f “ Say 100,000 years, since which time at least the piarine animals, now living along the
coast of Florid% have been in existence ; for their remains are found in the coral limestone
of the everglades, as well as in that of the keys, and upon the reef now growing up outside
of them.”
and fresh-water animals, vestiges of which have been buried in the deposits formed by the
fresh waters covering parts of its surface. So much for the probable ^
rate. . . •
M an, absolutely fossilized, exists therefore in North America.
We have shown that the alluvion of our river beds and deltas possesses
an antiquity, which would permit of the existence of man upon
the earth at a much more remote period than has been common y
assigned to him. We have given instances of his exhumation also m
the fossil state. The human fossils of Brazil and Florida carry back
the aboriginal population of this continent far beyond any necessity
of hunting for American man’s foreign origin through Asiatic immigration
: and the body of one Indian beneath the cypress forests at
New Orleans is eertainly more ancient than the lost “ tribes of Israel,
to whom the American type has been rather fancifully attributed.
Man’s vast antiquity can now be proved, moreover, by his works as
well as by his fossil remains. Authentic relics of human art have
been, at last, found in the diluvian drift. This drift, with its beds of
rolled stones, the detritus of older rocks, its masses of sand and
gravel, and the traces of its passage over mountain and plain m
almost every region of the earth, is vulgarly regarded as furnishing
irrefragable evidence of the Noachian deluge; as, indeed,
every remarkable g e o l o g i c a l appearance was supposed to prove the
.universality of that visitation. The numerous bones of the elephant,
the rhinoceros, and other extinct species of quadrupeds, occurring in this
deposit, were commonly denominated “ antediluvian remains,” and
assumed to be unquestionable vestiges of the | world before the flood !”
Among such remains, in deposits clearly belonging to the diluvial
epoch, traces of human industry are revealed, of an indisputable
character. For these revelations from an earlier world we are chiefly
indebted to the zeal and liberality of M. Boucher de Perthes, who
has given us an extraordinary work on the primitive industry of
man* In 1835, M. Ravin f published a description of a “Pirogue
Gauloise,” found under the turf at Estrebceuf on the Somme ; and in
the same year M. Picard describe^ an ornament made of the teeth of
the wild boar, and some very ancient axe-sheaths, &c., disclosed in a
similar situation near Picquigny. These researches, interrupted by
the death of M. Picard, were subsequently resumed by M. Boucher
de Perthes ; who pursued them until 1849, when he published the
result of his truly arduous labors.
M. de Perthes caused numerous excavations to be made in the Celtic
* Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes : Mémoire sur l’Industrie primitive, et les arts
à leur origine: par M. Boucher de Perthes — Paris, 1849.
•f Mémoires de la Société d’Emulation d’Abbeville — 1835.
45