154 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



valleys fifty or one hundred feet or more lower, leaving the remains 

 of the ancient drift-beds exposed high on what are now the slopes. 

 To fix our ideas on the picture of an actual locality, we may fancy 

 ourselves standing with Mr. Spurrell on the old sandy beach of the 

 Thames near Crayford, thirty-five feet above where the river now flows 

 two miles away in the valley. Here we are on the very workshop-floor 

 where palaeolithic man sat chipping at the blocks of flint which had 

 fallen out of the chalk-cliff above his head. There lie the broken re- 

 mains of his blocks, the flint-chips he knocked off, and which can be 

 fitted back into their places, the striking-stones with which the flaking 

 was done ; and with these the splintered bones of mammoth and ticho- 

 rhine rhinoceros, possibly remains of meals. Moreover, as if to point 

 the contrast between the rude palaeolithic man who worked these 

 coarse blocks, and apparently never troubled himself to seek for better 

 material, the modern visitor sees within fifty yards of the spot the bot- 

 tle-shaped pits dug out in later ages by neolithic man through the soil 

 to a depth in the chalk where a layer of good workable flint supplied 

 him with the material for his neat flakes and trimly-chipped arrow- 

 heads. The evidence of caverns such as those of Devonshire and Pe- 

 rigord, with their revelations of early European life and art, has been 

 supplemented by many new explorations, without shaking the conclu- 

 sion arrived at as to the age known as the reindeer period of the north- 

 ern half of Europe, when the mammoth and cave-bear and their con- 

 temporary mammals had not yet disappeared, but the close of the 

 Glacial period was merging into the times when in England and France 

 savages hunted the reindeer for food as the Arctic tribe of America 

 do still. Human remains of these early periods are still scarce and 

 unsatisfactory for determining race-types. Among the latest finds is 

 part of a skull from the loess at Potbaba, near Prague, with promi- 

 nent brow-ridges, though less remarkable in this way than the cele- 

 brated Neanderthal skull. It remains the prevailing opinion of anato- 

 mists that these very ancient skulls are not apt to show extreme low- 

 ness of type, but to be higher in the scale than, for instance, the Tas- 

 manian. The evidence increases as to the wide range of palaeolithic 

 man. He extended far into Asia, where his characteristic rude stone 

 implements are plentifully found in the caves of Syria and the foot-hills 

 of Madi'as. The question which this section may have especial means 

 of dealing with is whether man likewise inhabited America with the 

 great extinct animals of the Quaternary period, if not even earlier. 



Among the statements brought forward as to this subject, a few 

 are mere fictions, while others, though entirely genuine, are surrounded 

 with doubts, making it difficult to use them for anthropological pur- 

 poses. We shall not discuss the sandaled human giants, whose foot- 

 prints, twenty inches long, are declared to have been found with the 

 foot-prints of mammoths, among whom they walked, at Carson, Ne- 

 vada. There is something picturesque in the idea of a man in a past 



