132 ANNALS OF SCOTTISH NATURAL HISTORY 



found along with them in the Robin Hood Cave in the 

 Cressvvell Crags, and in caverns in North and South Wales. 

 When Scotland is considered, evidence of the existence 

 of the mammals of this epoch is not so abundant, yet the 

 interglacial beds of that country have yielded remains of 

 mammoth, reindeer, Irish elk, urus and horse. But notwith- 

 standing the keen scrutiny to which the superficial deposits 

 in Scotland have been subjected by the members of the 

 Geological Survey and others, no traces either of the bones 

 of Palaeolithic man or of the work of his hands have been 

 discovered in North Britain. This, indeed, is not much a 

 matter of surprise, for it must be remembered that, subsequent 

 to the genial interglacial epoch, another ice sheet, that of the 

 upper boulder clay, made its appearance, grinding over the 

 surface of the land, wearing away alluvia, and largely oblit- 

 erating the relics of interglacial times. Hence interglacial 

 beds occur only at intervals and are very fragmentary. Nor 

 in Scotland are there any caves similar in dimensions to 

 those which in England and elsewhere have yielded such 

 abundant traces of Palaeolithic man and his mammalian 

 congeners. If Palaeolithic man ever did exist in Scotland, 

 and there is no reason why he might not have migrated 

 northward from Yorkshire and Wales, yet one could hardly 

 expect to discover traces of his former presence. In Scot- 

 land there are no massive limestones, with extensive caverns, 

 in which man could have sheltered, and in which his relics 

 and remains could have been secure from destruction during 



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the advance of the second ice sheet. It is only in the 

 alluvial deposits of interglacial times that such traces have 

 been preserved, but these deposits, as we have seen, were 

 ploughed out and to a great extent demolished by the later 

 sheet of ice. The shreds that remain, however, are of extreme 

 interest, from the fact that they contain relics of the Pleis- 

 tocene mammals, with which Palaeolithic man was contem- 

 poraneous ; and there is a bare chance that some day traces 

 of man himself may be encountered in the same deposits. 



Geologists have shown that in the regions which were 

 overflowed by the second or minor ice sheet no traces of 

 Palaeolithic man, or of the southern mammals with which he 

 was associated, have ever been met with in British superficial 



