Flint Drift and Human Remains. 197 



Tnuder such conditions of comparative rest, as to allow the develop- 

 ment of a glacial fauna. Close to my own residence on the Clyde 

 each low ebb exposes numerous examples of the Pecten Islandicus 

 and of those very large Balani^ which are confined to arctic seas. 

 These beds of shells, which are all of existing species, but of spe- 

 cies which have retired from our now more genial temperature to 

 a northern habitat, were first described by my friend Mr. Smith 

 of Jordanhill, and his observations and conclusions have since 

 been abundantly confirmed. "We have no knowledge how this 

 period was brought to a close. But there seems to be evidence 

 that it had come to an end, and that for a long lime before the 

 last elevation of the land, and before man had appeared in Scot- 

 land. This seems to be a legitimate deduction from the fact that 

 the canoes in the elevated Clyde beds are formed of oak of large 

 dimensions and of great age. Forests which aflbrded such tim- 

 ber must have flourished in a climate not much more rigorous 

 than that which exists at present. Here again, then the earliest 

 footprints of our race are traced up to a point, preceding indeed 

 some important physical changes, but clearly subsequent to the 

 establishment of all the main conditions which now afi'ect the dis- 

 tribution of animal and vegetable life. 



As regards the extinction of some animals, I have spoken as if 

 the contemporaneousness of man with them whilst yet living ought 

 not to be absolutely assumed merely from the fact that his imple- 

 ments are associated with their bones. But on this point new 

 evidence is being rapidly collected and brought together. Mons. 

 Lartet, a distinguished French naturalist, has found what he con- 

 siders to be a distinct evidence of the mark of human weapons on 

 various parts of the skeletons of the extinct mammalia of the drift. 

 These marks have been detected on the skull of the Megaceros 

 Hibernicus, or great Irish elk — an animal which stood some ten 

 feet high — on the bones of the Rhinoceros tichorinus, and on 

 those of various species of the ox and deer, which are now either 

 extinct or confined to the last remnants of a declining race. The 

 marks are of various kinds — some of them peculiar — indicating 

 a sort of sawing with some instrument not of the smoothest edge. 

 M. Lartet has ascertained that these blows and cuttings could 

 not be made except on fresh bones — that is to say, on bones un- 

 dried and retaining their animal cartilage. Farther he has suc- 

 ceeded in producing on the bones of existing animals precisely 



