in Devon caverns or chased the bison over the hills of Kent. Yet this
epoch of huge and ferocious monsters, following upon the Age of Ice, is
a recent chapter of the great epic of man; there lies far more behind
it, beyond the Age of Ice to the immensely distant Pliocene; beyond this
as far as the early Miocene; beyond this, again, how much further we
know not, towards the beginningless beginning, the infinite.

We are, therefore, face to face with an ordered series of almost
boundless ages, geologic epochs of human history succeeding each other
in majestic procession, as the face of our island was now tropical, now
arctic; as the seas swelled up and covered the hills, or the bottom of
the deep drove back the ocean and became dry land, an unbroken
continent. The wild dreams of romance never approached the splendid
outlines of this certain history.

There are dim outlines of man throughout all these ages, but only at a
comparatively recent date have we traditions and evidence pointing to
still surviving races. At a period of only a few thousand years ago, we
begin to catch glimpses of a northern race whom the old Greeks and
Romans called Hyperboreans or Far-Northerners; a race wild and little
skilled in the arts of life; a race of small stature, slight, dusky,
with piercing eyes, low brows, and of forbidding face. This race was
scattered over lands far north of the Mediterranean, dwelling in caves
and dens of the earth, and lingering on unchanged from the days of
mammoth and cave-bear. We have slight but definite knowledge of this
very ancient race--enough to show us that its peculiar type lingers to
this day in a few remote islands on the Galway and Kerry coast, mingled
with many later races. This type we find described in old Gaelic records
as the Firbolgs, a race weak and furtive, dusky and keen-eyed, subjected
by later races of greater force. Yet from this race, as if to show the