I.] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. 9 



in looking over a few trays of these implements is the remark- 

 able likeness which they bear to those of Dordogne. Indeed 

 many of the figures in the magnificent ' Reliquiae Aquitanicae ' 

 might almost have been produced from these specimens." And 

 Sir J. Evans, extending his glance over a wider horizon, discovers 

 implements in other distant lands " so identical in form and 

 character with British specimens that they might have been manu- 

 factured by the same hands... On the banks of the Nile, many 

 hundreds of feet above its present level, implements of the 

 European types have been discovered, while in Somaliland, in an 

 ancient river valley, at a great elevation above the sea, Mr Seton- 

 Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint 

 and quartzite, which, judging from their form and character, might 

 have been dug out of the drift-deposits of the Somme and the 

 Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent." And on the very 

 strength of these identities Sir John re-echoes my theory that man 

 originated in the East and migrated thence to Europe' 2 . 



Certain skulls from South Australia seem cast in almost the 

 same mould as the Neanderthal, the oldest known in Central 

 Europe, and the palaeolithic crania hitherto discovered in the latter 

 region present without exception the same uniform long-headed 

 type. The same type persists, though not everywhere, well into 

 the New Stone Age, so that at first sight one might suppose that 

 but few or slight specialisations of the pleistocene precursors were 

 anywhere developed during the immensely long Old Stone Age, to 

 which M. Jules Peroche assigns a period of some 300,000 years 

 since the beginning of the Chellian epoch 3 . 



But of course changes were always and everywhere going on, 

 although scarcely perceptible in the less favoured 

 regions, while in the later periods of the Old Stone during the 

 Age the progress in the arts was so great that in 

 some respects it was never afterwards surpassed or even equalled. 

 Some of the exquisitely-wrought flints of the Solutrian period 

 cannot now be reproduced, and many such objects ascribed by 



1 Jour. Anthrop. Inst. 1896, p. 133. 



; Inaugural Address, Brit. Ass. Meeting, Toronto, 1897. See also Dr 

 F. Carlsen in Glob us, 72, p. 67. 



f Les Temperatures quaternaires, Lille, 1897. 



