I.] GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS. II 



wild conjecture are now invited to consider, first, the vast an- 

 tiquity of strictly historic times in the light of recent research, 

 and especially the still receding vista of Egyptian, Babylonian, and 

 Minaean origins as summarily referred to in the following pages ; 

 second, the inconceivably remote age assigned to the appearance 

 of Neolithic Man in Scotland by no less an authority than Sir 

 William Turner. After showing that there is undoubted evidence 

 of the presence of man in North Britain during the formation of 

 the Carse clays, this careful observer explains that the Carse 

 cliffs, now in places 45 to 50 feet above the present sea-level, 

 formed the bed of an estuary or arm of the sea, which in post- 

 glacial times extended almost, if not quite across the land from 

 east to west, thus separating the region south of the Forth from 

 North Britain. He even suggests, after the separation of Britain 

 from the Continent in earlier times, another land connection, a 

 "Neolithic land-bridge" by which the men of the New Stone Age 

 may have reached Scotland when the upheaved zoo-foot terrace 

 was still clothed with the great forest growths that have since 

 disappeared l . 



One begins to ask, Are even 100,000 years sufficient for such 

 oscillations of the surface, upheaval of marine beds, appearance of 

 great estuaries, renewed connection of Britain with the Continent 

 by a "Neolithic land-bridge"? In the Falkirk district Neolithic 

 kitchen-middens occur on, or at the base of, the bluffs which over- 

 look the Carse lands, that is, the old sea-coast. In the Carse of 

 Gowrie also a dug-out canoe was found at the very base of the 

 deposits, and immediately above the buried forest-bed of the Tay 

 valley 2 . 



That the Neolithic period was also of long duration even in 

 Scandinavia has been made evident by Carl Wibling, who cal- 

 culates that the geological changes on the south-east coast of 

 Sweden (Province of Bleking), since its first occupation by the men 

 of the New Stone Age, must have required a period of " at least 

 10,000 years." 



1 Discourse at the R. Institute, London, Nature, Jan. 6 and 13, 1898. 



2 Nature. 1898, p. 235. 



3 Tidenfbr Blekings forsta bebyggande, Karlskrona, 1895, p. 5. 



