MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 147 



t>rganic life first appeared on the earth as lying between twenty and thirty 

 millions of years. Man, gradually evolved from tree-living ancestors, 

 appeared comparatively recently upon the scene. 



It has been shown in several ways that man existed during and before the 

 last Glacial Period in Europe, by the association in man> cases of his 

 handiwork with the remains of extinct animals such as the woolly rhinoceros 

 and mammoth which existed at that time as far south as the south of France, 

 also by the occurrence of his weapons in the gravel drift in France and 

 England at considerable depths, that gravel being now not in a river bed but 

 in many cases at the tops of hills, showing that since that period the present 

 valley has been formed — as for instance that of the river Thames in England 

 and the Somme in France. 



There is also the evidence as to age obtained from caverns in both countries, 

 in which the implements were sealed up by silt, and the familiar stalagmite 

 formation, which is deposited at a more or less fixed rate. 



The date of the latest of the many Glacial Periods can be roughly arrived 

 at not only astronomically by the alteration in the position of the earth's axis, 

 but also geologically, and thirdly from the examination of the deposits in 

 caverns, as for instance Kent's Cavern at Torquay between 1825 and 1841, by 

 Mr. Godwin Austen in 1840, and six years later by the Torquay Natural 

 History Society. But ihe final examination extended over twelve years and 

 was supervised by a Committee of the British Association between 1868 and 

 1880. All three methods of computation are substantially in agreement. 

 The implements in Kent's Cavern most resembling the Indian ones (which 

 I have had the honour of discovering and presenting to the Bombay Natural 

 History Society) are those in the lowest stratum of all known as the Breccia, 

 a dark-red sandy earth holding quartz nodules, and not at all unlike the 

 lateritic deposits in which the Indian implements are always embedded or out 

 of which they are derived. 



Very briefly this is the order of the Kent's Cavern Strata from the top : 



(1) Blocks of limestone up to 100 tons. 



(2) The Black Mould up to 1 foot in thickness. 



(3) Stalagmite floor of granular texture up to five feet in thickness and 

 containing limestone blocks. 



(4) The Black Band up to 4 inches. 



(5) The Cave Earth — a red clay less than 4 feet thick and in some parts 

 absent. 



(6) A stalagmite floor up to 12 feet thick. 



(7) The Breccia. 



By various, methods of computation it seems that as long ago as 250,000 

 years man flourished in Europe, and therefore probably long before. 



When I made my discoveries in Somaliland, during thirteen expeditions 

 to that country, of stone implements at Jalelo on the Issutugan, of exquisite 

 workmanship and in considerable numbers (three rather poor examples of 



