GEOLOGY. 805 



ally depress or lift the land, or silently erode and reconstruct it. By cadi of 

 these her answers as to time are di^:<r^nily interpreted." 



" In conclusion, then, of the whole inquiry/' says Professor Rogers, " con- 

 densing 1 into one expression my answer to the general question, Whether a 

 remote prc-historic antiquity for the human race has been established from 

 the recent discovery of specimens of man's handiwork in the so-called dilu- 

 vium, I maintain it is not proven; b} 7 no means asserting that it can be 

 disproved, but insisting simply that it remains not proven." 



On some Bronze Relics from tl\e Auriferous Sands of Siberia. At a recent 

 meeting of the London Geological Society, Mr. T. W. Atkinson, the well- 

 known Asiatic traveller, stated, that during his stay at the gold mine on the 

 River Shargan, in Siberia (latitude 59 30' north, and longitude 96 10' east), 

 in August, 1831, some fragments of worked bronze were dug up by the work- 

 men, at a depth of fourteen feet eight inches below the surface, from a bed 

 of sand in which gold nuggets occur. This sand rests on the rock, and is 

 covered by beds of gravel and sand, overlain by two feet of vegetable soil. 

 The fragments appear to have belonged either to a bracelet or to some horse- 

 trappings. This paper was discussed with great interest, as it tended to 

 prove the existence of man, in a tolerably advanced condition of civilization, 

 before the deposition of the strata containing the bones of the great mam- 

 malia. From the evidence collected by Mr. Atkinson, there was no doubt 

 that the fragments were discovered in the situation exhibited in the drawings, 

 which he made on the spot, and neither he nor the officers of the mines 

 detected any appearance of disturbance in the superincumbent strata. It 

 did not, however, appear that any minute examination was made by any 

 geologist experienced in this kind of inquiry, and the general impression was 

 rather in favor of assuming that the articles must have been conveyed by 

 some unknown force from a more recent stratum to that in which they were 

 found, than to believe that a race, sufficiently advanced in science to make 

 works of bronze, existed in Siberia at a period so enormously anterior not 

 only to the pre-historic time which archaeologists have investigated, but even 

 to that which geologists have assigned as the probable commencement of the 

 appearance of man. 



At the last meeting of the British Association, the Rev. Dr. Anderson, 

 F. G. S., presented a paper, the object of which was to combat the idea that 

 any of the recent geological discoveries can in truth carry back the creation 

 of man to a period anterior to that assigned by the Mosaic chronology. He 

 classifies into three divisions the cases which are relied upon by those who 

 maintain the very remote antiquity of the human race. The first of these 

 comprises the instances in which human relics have been found, thickly 

 incrusted in a matrix of stony matter, in the calcareous breccias and strata 

 now in process of formation. There is, he contends, no evidence whatever 

 that the relics discovered in such situations as these were deposited at a 

 comparatively recent period. Instances are of not unfrequent occurrence, 

 especially on the southeast coast of England, in which flints are found 

 enclosing coins, fragments of bolts, anchors, etc., and other human relics, 

 the stony covering of which has so completely the aspect of true rock-sub- 

 stance as to warrant at first sight the conclusion that its deposit has been the 

 work of countless ages; but, on removing the flinty matrix, the coin is found 

 to bear the head of an Edward, a James, or even a George, and the bolt or 

 anchor to be stamped with the mark of some still-existing firm. Facts like 

 these prove that the incrustation of relics deposited by a shipwreck or other- 



