470 ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 



Sir Charles Lyell, who may liave beeu buried in more recent times un- 

 der lava of Pliocene date. On these discoveries no superstructure can 

 be built. The Calaveras skull seems to have better claims to a high 

 antiquity. It is said to have been found at a depth of 153 feet in the 

 auriferous gravels of California, containing remains of mastodon, and 

 covered by five or six beds of lava or volcanic ashes. But here again 

 doubts enter into the case, as well-fashioned mortars, stone hatchets, 

 and even pottery are said to occur in the same deposits. In the same 

 way the discoveries of M. Ameghino at the mouth of the Plata, in the 

 Argentine Republic, require much further corroboration. 



The presumably worked bones which I have placed in the second 

 category, such as those with incisions in them, from St. Prest, near 

 Chartres, the cut bones of Cetacea in Tuscany, the fractured bones in 

 our own crag deposits, and numerous other specimens of a similar 

 character, have, by most geologists, been regarded as bearing marks 

 entirely due to natural agencies. It seems more probable that in 

 bones deposited at the bottom of Pliocene seas cuts and marks should 

 have been produced by the teeth of carnivorous fish than by men who 

 could only have lived on the shores of the seas, and who have left behind 

 them no instruments by which such cuts as those on the bones could 

 have been produced. 



As to the third category, the instruments of flint reported to have 

 been found in Tertiary deposits, those best known are from St. Prest 

 and Thenay, in the northwest of France, and Otta, in Portugal. 



These three localities I have visited ; and though at the two former, 

 the beds in which the flints were said to have been found are certainly 

 Pliocene, there is considerable doubt in some cases whether the flints 

 have been fashioned at all, and in others where they appear to have 

 been wrought, whether they belong to the beds in which they are re- 

 ported to have been found, and have not come from the surface of the 

 ground. Even the suggestion that the flints of Thenay were fashioned 

 by the Dryopithecus, one of the precursors of man, has now been re- 

 tracted. At Otta the flakes that have been found present, as a rule, 

 only a single bulb of percussion, and having been found on tbe surface, 

 their evidence is of small value. The exact geological age of the beds 

 in which they have occurred is moreover somewhat doubtful. On the 

 whole, therefore, it appears to me that the present verdict as to Ter- 

 tiary man must be in the form " Not proven." 



When we consider the vast amount of time comprised in the Tertiary 

 period, with its three great principal subdivisions of the Eocene, Mio- 

 cene, and Pliocene, and when we bear in mind that of the vertebrate 

 land animals, of the Eocene, no one has survived to the present time, 

 while of the Pliocene, but one — the hippopotamus — remains unmodified, 

 the chances that man as at present constituted should also be a sur- 

 vivor from that period seem remote ; and against the species Homo 

 sapiens having existed in Miocene times, almost incalculable. The a 



