CORRESPONDENCE. 



Plateau Man at the British Association. 



In reading over the report of the British Association discussion on Professor 

 Rupert Jones's paper in the last number of Natural Science, 1 1 am struck with a series 

 of curious coincidences, and as I consider they are calculated to propagate a very 

 wrong impression, I venture to ask to be allowed to point them out. I do not for a 

 moment suppose it was intentionally done, especially in the face of the opening 

 sentences, still it is very strange that almost every adverse criticism raised by the 

 speakers is given, while nearly all arguments for, and admission of, the antiquity of 

 plateau man are overlooked, and a summing-up given which may not always be 

 taken in the way which a further examination of the facts of the case would demand. 

 This is all the more to be regretted, as every supposed argument urged against 

 plateau man rises on the speakers not being in possession of all the facts of the case. 

 If it were simply an instance of various interpretations being put upon well-known 

 phenomena of the origin of which we know but little, differences of opinion are all 

 that could be expected ; but in this subject — as indeed is elsewhere suggested in 

 reference to all others — the value of one's opinion is not to be estimated alone by 

 qualifications in other branches of science, however nearly related they may be to 

 the question at issue, but by the amount of careful, extensive, and prolonged 

 research in and out of the field he has given to it, qualified by his ability to observe. 

 I am very much tempted to answer the criticisms raised at the British Association 

 meetings one by one, but for my confidence in the effect of the publication of the 

 results of recent labours. Those who are in possession of the facts of the subject 

 have but one opinion ; those who differ from us will alter theirs as knowledge 

 accumulates. Truth is doubtless as precious to them as to ourselves, although some 

 people are apt at times to forget that change of opinion is an honest man's 

 characteristic. I thus hasten to a further examination of the discussion. Now I 

 think the way this can best be done is to go through the remarks of each speaker, 

 in so far as they bear upon the point at issue. The first speaker was Mr. Whitaker, 

 in whose speech I find the following : — "This certainly carries man back, locally at 

 all events, beyond the time of the river gravels, which occur in the bottoms and 

 along the slopes of the valleys." He appears (T'mw report) to have been followed 

 by Mr. Montgomerie Bell, who said that, in his opinion, " they (the plateau relics) 

 belonged to pre-Glacial or Pliocene times." The next speaker was Sir John Evans, 

 who admitted " that the principal outcome of recent discoveries was, to his mind, the 

 fact that the existence of Palaeolithic man could be carried further back in time than 

 the valley gravels, inasmuch as flints are found in gravels on the plateaux at far higher 

 levels." Sir John was followed by Dr. Hicks — who has had far too much experience 

 in this subject to deny the pre-Glacial existence of man in Britain, — and he pointed 

 out the great concession that had been made by Sir John Evans, and also how the 

 same had been wrung out of the veteran Professor Prestwich by the repeated 

 discoveries of man's work in pre-Boulder Clay deposits. Then followed Professor 

 Boyd Dawkins, who made some sweeping assertions, which, like the adverse criticisms 

 of other speakers, can be flatly challenged ; but so far as the question at issue is 

 concerned, he said he agreed with what Mr. Whitaker and Sir John Evans had said, 

 and made no exception to the extension of time they had granted. General Pitt 



^ Reprinted in full in the present number, pp. 269-275. — Ed. 



