REVIEWS 181 



known to the world (though, we believe, before the Dawson-Woodward paper was 

 actually published), and yet they contain virtually no reference to that epoch- 

 making event, a fault which is aggravated by nearly a year's delay in publication. 

 This is the more disappointing in that there is of course no one more competent 

 than the author to answer the important question as to whether the Piltdown 

 relics — one of the two oldest discoveries of man in Europe — should be attributed 

 to the first or to the second interglacial epoch. 



The work deals, as its title implies, with the purely geological side of pre- 

 historic anthropology, anatomical and archaeological matters being only referred 

 to so far as is necessary to make the geological story intelligible. The extreme 

 views on the question of the antiquity of man obtain scant recognition from 

 Prof. Geikie. Here we have no talk of Oligocene, Miocene, or even of Pliocene 

 humanity. The claims of the eoliths are dismissed in a few paragraphs, and 

 the Ipswich and Galley Hill skeletons are not deemed worthy of mention. Even 

 the Pliocene " rostro-carinate implements," championed by Ray Lankester, are 

 regarded as more than doubtful. The problem is thus narrowed down to the 

 Pleistocene, and the opinions expressed are representative of the more cautious 

 school of anthropologists. 



The dramatic story of the Glacial Epochs is told us once again, and with a 

 wealth of detail which makes the book of value to the student as well as to the 

 general reader. We are given a vision of the musk-ox, the banded lemming 

 (well described as " the warmth-hater "), and other denizens of the tundras coming 

 south through twenty degrees of latitude, of icebergs stranded on the Azores, 

 and of vast Swiss glaciers boring huge trenches hundreds of feet deep. The 

 successive lectures deal with the Pleistocene fauna and flora, with the testimony 

 of the caves, the river-drifts, and the great morainic accumulations, with the 

 interglacial strata ; and finally a chronological history of the Pleistocene is given. 

 There is a thorough treatment of the flora as well as of the fauna, and both 

 animals and plants are illustrated by numerous charming plates. The botany of 

 the Pleistocene is very important, because the plants afford a more reliable index 

 to climatic changes than the animals can supply. No doubt in many instances, 

 where remains of animals apparently belonging to different climates are found 

 in juxtaposition, the creatures were not really contemporaneous — different strata 

 have become mixed up ; but this is not so in every case, and there is little doubt 

 that the lion and the hyena, for instance, ranged into colder climes in the 

 Pleistocene than they do now, and the converse appears to be true of the arctic 

 fox. 



As is well known, Prof. Geikie's scheme includes six glacial epochs, not 

 four as in the more generally accepted classification. His differences with Penck 

 and the other great German pioneers are, however, scarcely more than verbal. 

 His first four epochs correspond entirely to their four, and it is not denied on the 

 one side that there were several subsequent returns of cold conditions, nor is it 

 contended on the other side that such recurrences approached in severity any of 

 the four great ice-ages. Moreover, it is known for certain that Palaeolithic man 

 and the distinctively Pleistocene fauna vanished before the fifth glacial epoch of 

 Geikie. It is a moot point whether the last cold phases were sufficiently severe 

 to be styled " Glacial Periods." There are proofs of three returns of cold 

 conditions in the Alps, but the first of these is indistinguishable from the fourth 

 glacial period in Scotland. Thus the author's first glacial epoch is evidenced by 

 the Chillesford Clay and Weybourne Crag, which used to be classed as Pliocene, 

 and his last two are Neolithic. 



