ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 99 



ing to look back on the discussions of those days. While one class 

 of objectors accounted for the configuration of the flint implements 

 from the gravels by some unknown chemical agency, by the violent 

 and continued gyratory action of water, by fracture resulting from 

 pressure, by rapid cooling when hot, or by rapid heating when cold, 

 or even regarded them as aberrant forms of fossil fishes, there were 

 others who, when compelled to acknowledge that the implements 

 were the work of men's hands, attempted to impugn and set aside the 

 evidence as to the circumstances under which they had been discov- 

 ered. In doing this they adopted the view that the worked flints 

 had either been introduced into the containing beds at a compara- 

 tively recent date, or if they actually formed constituent parts of 

 the gravel then that this was a mere modern alluvium resulting from 

 floods at no very remote period. In the course of a few years the 

 main stream of scientific thought left this controversy behind, 

 though a tendency to cut down the lapse of time necessary for all 

 the changes that have taken place in the configuration of the surface 

 of the earth and in the character of its occupants since the time of 

 the palaeolithic gravels still survives in the inmost recesses of the 

 hearts of not a few observers. 



In his address to this association at the Bath meeting of 1864 Sir 

 Charles Lyell struck so true a note that I am tempted to reproduce 

 the paragraph to which I refer: "When speculations on the long 

 series of events which occurred in the Glacial and Post-glacial periods 

 are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity 

 of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all 

 referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the 

 number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a dis- 

 position is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in pre- 

 historic times by investing the causes which have modified the 

 animate and inanimate world with extraordinay and excessive en- 

 ergy. It is related of a great Irish orator of our day that when he 

 was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously toward a public 

 charity he was persuaded by a friend to make a more liberal dona- 

 tion. In doing so he apologized for his first apparent want of 

 generosity by saying that his early life had been a constant struggle 

 with scanty means, and that ' they who are born to affluence can not 

 easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty 

 out of one's bones.' In like manner we of the living generation, 

 when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order 

 to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink 

 naturally at first from making what seems so lavish an expendi- 

 ture of past time. Throughout our early education we have been 

 accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronol- 



