370 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Yol. X. 



GENERAL CONCLUSIONS. 



It remains now for us to sum up the results of this inquiry, in 

 which we have been led very far afield. The identity of the 

 implements of the River-drift hunter proves that he was in the 

 same rude state of civilisation, if it can be called civilisation, in 

 the Old and New Worlds, when the hands of the geological clock 

 pointed to the same hour. It is not a little strange that his 

 mode of life should have been the same in the forests to the 

 north as south of the Mediterranean, in Palestine, in the tropical 

 forests of India, and on the western shores of the Atlantic. The 

 hunter of the reindeer in the valley of the Deleware was to all 

 intents and purposes the same sort of savage as the hunter of the 

 reindeer on the banks of the Wiley or of the Solent. It does 

 not, however, follow that this identity of implements implies that 

 the same race of men were spread over this vast tract. It points 

 rather to a primeval condition of savagery from which mankind 

 has emerged in the long ages which separate it from our own 

 time. 



It may further be inferred, from his wide-spread range that 

 the River-drift man (assuming that mankind sprang from one 

 centre) must have inhabited the earth for a long time, and that 

 his dispersal took place before the glacial submergence and the 

 lowering of the temperature in Northern Europe, Asia, and 

 America. It is not reasonable to suppose that the Straits of 

 Behring would have offered a free passage, either to the River- 

 drift man f.iom Asia to America, or to American animals from 

 America to P^urope, or vice versa, while there was a vast barrier 

 of ice or of sea, or of both, in the high northern latitudes. 



I therefore feel inclined to view the River-drift hunter as hav- 

 ing invaded Europe in pre-giacial times along with the other 

 living species which then appeared. The evidence, as I have 

 already pointed out, is conclusive that he was also glacial and 

 post-glacial. 



In all probability the birth-place of man was in a warm if not 

 a tropical region of Asia, in " a garden of Eden," and from this 

 the River-drift man found his way into these regions where his 

 implements occur. In India he was a member of a tropical 

 fauna, and his distribution in Europe and along the shores of the 

 Mediterranean prove him to have belonged either to the tem- 

 perate or the southern fauna in those regions. 



