478 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



xvi. pp. 319-25) he refers to it at some length. He criti- 

 cises the continued employment of the word Paleolithic on 

 the same grounds that I adopted, and he proposes a new 

 classification. He would call the whole pre-Aurignacian story 

 of man in Europe the " Palaeanthropic Age," and all the 

 subsequent periods, from the Aurignacian onwards, he would 

 group together as the " Neoanthropic Age." One hopes that 

 the point will be taken up by other scholars no less influential 

 than Prof. Smith. My experience is that intelligent readers, 

 who do not happen to be specialists, are constantly misled 

 by the survival of Lord Avebury's terminology, and therefore 

 no excuse is necessary for having referred to this matter again. 

 Whether Prof. Elliot Smith's proposal or mine be preferred 

 is a minor point. The essential point is that we should get 

 rid of the word " Paleolithic." 



Prof. Elliot Smith has also been recently developing 

 in an extraordinarily interesting manner the thesis that the 

 Pre-Columbian civilisations of America — or at least many 

 important features in those civilisations — were not truly 

 aboriginal, but came in a cultural wave from Asia across the 

 Pacific Ocean, the original starting-point of the most remark- 

 able characteristics being Egypt. The facts are set out fully 

 in a paper entitled " The Influence of Ancient Egyptian 

 Civilisation in the East and in America " which will be found 

 in the Bulletin of the John Ry lands Library for January 

 to March 19 16. Prof. Smith believes that the extremely 

 peculiar culture of Egypt was spread eastwards by mariners, 

 mainly Phoenicians, for several centuries after B.C. 800. To 

 quote the author's own words, he thinks that " the essential 

 elements of the ancient civilisations of India [the pre- 

 Aryan civilisations], Further India, the Malay Archipelago, 

 Oceania, and America were brought in succession to each of 

 these places by mariners, whose oriental migrations began as 

 trading intercourse between the Eastern Mediterranean and 

 India some time after 800 B.C., and that the highly complex 

 and artificial culture which they spread abroad was derived 

 largely from Egypt (not earlier than the 21st Dynasty) but 

 also included many important accretions " from other sources, 

 and that after traversing Asia and Oceania, and becoming 

 modified on the way, the stream finally " continued for many 

 centuries to play upon the Pacific littoral of America, where 



