360 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Yol. X. 



ON THE PRESENT PHASE OF THE ANTIQUITY 



OF MAN. 



By W. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., F.R.S., F.G.S., F.S.A. 



(Address delivered before the Anthropological Section of the British Association 

 for ths Advancement of Science at Southampton. August. 1S82.) 



In takin^r the chair in this department of the biological section 

 of the British Association, two courses lie open before me. I 

 might give an address whivh should be a history of the progress 

 of anthropology duriog the last year, or I might devote myself 

 to some special branch. The swift developement of our young 

 and rapidly growing science, which embraces within its scope all 

 that is known, not merely about man, but about his environment, 

 in present and past times, renders the first and more ambitious 

 course peculiarly difficult to one, like myself, laboring under the 

 pressure of many avocations. I am therefore driven to adopt 

 the second and the easier, by choosing a subject with which I 

 am familiar, and which appears to me to be appropriate in this 

 place of meeting. I propose to place before you the present 

 phase of the inquiry into the antiquity of man, and to point out 

 what we know of the conditions of life — thouuh our knowledge 

 of them is imperfect and fragmentary — under which man has 

 appeared in the Old and in the New Worlds. The rudely chipped 

 implements left by the primeval hunters in the beds of gravel of 

 Hampshire and Wiltshire, and along the shores of Southampton 

 Water and elsewhere, are eloquent witnesses of the presence of 

 man in this district, at a time when there was no Southampton 

 Water, and the elephant and the reindeer wandered over the site 

 of this busy mart of ships ; when the Isle of Wight was not an 

 island, and the River-drift hunter could walk across from Ports- 

 mouth to Cowes, with no obstacle excepting that offered by the 

 rivers and morasses I propose to enter upon the labors of Prest- 

 wich, Evans, Stevens and Blackmore, Codrington, Read, Brown 

 and other investigators in this countr}^, and to combine the results 

 of their inquiries with those in other countries, and with some 

 observations of my own which I was able to make in 1880, dur- 

 ing my visit to the United States. 



THE LIMITATION OF THE INQUIRY. 



The most striking feature in the study of the Tertiary period 

 is the gradual and orderly succession of higher types of Mam- 

 malia, so well defined and so orderly, that I have used it as a 



