148 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. XV. 



which are all I have been able to offer to the Society) and the first ever found 

 in Africa, Sir J. Evans, the Treasurer of the Royal Society, in a communication 

 to that body at once claimed them as paleolithic and as completing the chain 

 of evidence linking India with Europe in prehistoric times. The types were 

 identically the same all over the world. So much, then, as regards the age of 

 Indian paleolithic implements. Of what kind were the men who used them ? 

 At the present day there are, I believe, no scientific men of eminence or at 

 any rate hardly any, who do not accept the theories first propounded by 

 Charles Darwin as clearly proved by overwhelming evidence all pointing one 

 way. Man bas ascended from the same root or arboreal ancestor as the 

 anthropoid apes. His superior brain has given bim the mastery, and given 

 an upright position and the use of his hands, everything else has been shown 

 necessarily to follow. 



It is to be hoped that in India some caves may be found containing the re- 

 mains of extinct animals, amongst which stone implements may be looked for, 

 such as the caves at Bruniquel (Tarn et Garonne) and La Madelaine (Dor- 

 dogne) in France ; and those at Plymouth, at Brixham and in Yorkshire. We 

 have not forgotten the recent discovery by M. Dubois in Java of part of the 

 cranium and femur of an ape-like man or man*like ape (scientific opinion is 

 divided as to what to call it) in Pleistocene deposits — named Pithecanthropus 

 erectus ; it was thought that the earliest discovered examples of the skull of 

 prehistoric man were merely deformities and that their ape-like character was 

 accidental. 



Repetition has rendered this impossible. When the Neanderthal specimen 

 was discovered not far from Dusseldorf in Rhenish Prussia its extraordinary 

 appearance led some eminent scientists at first to regard it as a deformed 

 specimen, until the subsequent discoveries in the caves of Eguisheim (near 

 Colmar, Alsace), at Briix (Bohemia) and at Spy (Namur, Belgium) and so on. 

 A specimen was found as long ago as 1700 at Canustedt (Wiirtemburg). 



That the Indian specimens which I have presented to the Bombay Natural 

 History Society are at least as old as the lateritic beds in which they occcr, is 

 shown by the condition of the chipped surfaces which are stained in exactly 

 the same way as the unworked quartsite boulders in the same bed. Some 

 have been waterworn previous to becoming embedded and some washed out 

 and waterworn afterwards. 



H. W. SETON-KARR. 



Wimbledon, London, S. W., 



February, ]y03. 



No. XXI —DROUGHT-RESISTING FODDER PLANTS FOR INDIA. 



In view of the importance of this subject and the imnense benefit which 

 will result to India if some good drought-resisting fodder plants are in- 

 troduced, the following note by Sir W. Wedderburn will be read with interest. 

 Atriplex scmibaccata appears to have proved to be a most successful fodder- 



