It is utterly impossible that the races of the whole world, of all
the continents and islands, could have preserved traditions from the
most remote ages, of a comet having struck the earth, of the great
heat, the conflagration, the cave-life, the age of darkness, and the
return of the sun, and yet these things have had no basis of fact. It
was not possible for the primitive mind to have imagined these things
if they had never occurred.
{p. 121}
CHAPTER II.
DID MAN EXIST BEFORE THE DRIFT?
FIRST, let us ask ourselves this question, Did man exist before the
Drift?
If he did, he must have survived it; and he could hardly have passed
through it without some remembrance of such a terrible event
surviving in the traditions of the race.
If he did not exist before the Drift, of course, no myths descriptive
of it could have come down to us.
This preliminary question must, then, be settled by testimony.
Let us call our witnesses
"The pal?olithic hunter of the mid and late Pleistocene
river-deposits in Europe belongs, as we have already shown, to a
fauna which arrived in Britain before the lowering of the temperature
produced glaciers and icebergs in our country; he may, therefore, be
viewed as being probably pre-glacial.
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