348 NATURAL SCIENCE. Nov., 



in the Manual Geol. India, 1879, pp. 389 and 441, pi. xxi., figs. 2, 2a. 

 A good general note on the worked flakes and stone implements 

 found in India is given at pp. 440-442 of the Manual, 1879, with 

 references up to date. 



Of course some of the occurrences of flakes and cores above- 

 mentioned may be merely prehistoric, but others are of Pleistocene 

 and some probably of Pliocene age. 



Certainly the many stone implements and chipped flakes found 

 in Southern India at different elevations appear to prove that great 

 changes in the physical geography of the Indian peninsula have taken 

 place since the time when the implement-makers first inhabited the 

 country.5 These terrestrial movements and consequent alteration of 

 surface-conditions were mostly Post-Tertiary, but some probably took 

 place in the Pliocene or late Tertiary times, when such disturbances 

 appear to have been frequent and energetic. 



III. — Dr. Noetling's discovery (see above, p. 346) takes us back to 

 still earlier times, for he has good reason to regard the rock from 

 which he took the specimen that we have described above from his 

 notes and figures as of Miocene age. With a philosophic caution he 

 gives the benefit of any doubt in this case to the early Pliocene 

 (in the text) rather than to the latest Miocene (as in the title 

 of the paper). We note that he throws an unnecessary doubt on the 

 word " chipped " in the title of his paper, though there can be no 

 doubt as to the artificial dressing of the flake. So also, in spite of his 

 other doubt, the " Miocene" of Burma with its Hippotherium [Hipparion) 

 may well belong to that geological stage, although by " homotaxis " (that 

 is, the mere local succession of certain fossils) it might be supposed to 

 be either older or younger, if its organisms had not been really con- 

 temporaneous, but localised by migration at unequal times — that is, 

 at different periods. The Hipparion, however, one of the predecessors 

 of the Horse, had powers of progression in and along the great 

 Asiatico-European continent similar to those the Horse is known to 

 have had ; and its fossilised remains, therefore, characterise deposits in 

 which they occur in France, Germany, Greece, Northern India, and 

 Burma, not only as homotaxeous, but as being really contemporaneous. 

 If the equine animal, so the then existing Man would be really of the 

 same age as the Miocene fossils and the associated manufactured 

 flint flakes of France (?) and India. 



Long ago Dr. Hugh Falconer expressed his opinion that the 

 remains of Man would be found in the Tertiary strata of India. The 

 researches in the Sewaliks and elsewhere by Colonel Cautley and 

 himself had caused them to entertain that idea ; and in 1865 

 Dr. Falconer stated that more than twenty-five years previously they 

 had shadowed out this speculation in a communication to the 

 Geological Society of London, and that nothing had occurred to 



* Quart, jfuurn. Geol. Soc, vol. xxiv., 1868, p. 484. 



