If Ossian lived at the introduction of Christianity, as by all appearances he did, his epoch will be the latter end of the third and beginning of the fourth century.

That epoch was doubtless the newer Pliocene or Glacial Era, when the Mya truncata and other northern forms now extinct in the Mediterranean, and found fossil in the Sicilian tertiaries, ranged into that sea.

Another epoch in the girlhood of this remarkable young lady was the engagement, somewhat previously, of her mind in the controversy between the Church and Nonconformity.

The epoch thus created was the emancipation of the human being from dependent childhood to self-dependent manhood, and it constituted the first epoch in the self-conscious history, which is the history proper, of the human race.

This epoch was the crisis of my fate, dividing what may be called the offensive part from the defensive, which has been the sole business of my remaining years.

Accordingly it seems not improbable that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at the beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of the year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from the homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early winter.

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.

The happy Eocene beheld him not; That cheerful epoch when a morning ramble Among the mammoths, without gun or shot, Must have been such a truly sportive scramble.