86 Proceedings of the Royal Society of Victoria. 



tained by Mr. Vale, and is confirmed by a slight cut near the 

 end of the bone, made by the writer. On the whole, then, it 

 appears that although there are reasonable a priori grounds for 

 suspecting that the rib was surreptitiously carved before it 

 reached Mr. Kent's hands, yet the reasons against believing that 

 it was actually so tampered with are insuperable. If, then, the 

 bone received its present shape from the hand of man, and before 

 it was buried to 238ft. below the ground, we cannot decline to 

 see in it an implement fashioned out of a bone of a now extinct 

 animal by a man to whom the living animal was familiar, since 

 after fossilisation and the brittleness induced thereby, the forma- 

 tion of its chopped surfaces by a savage was simply impossible. 



In an object which is believed to be the first to record the 

 presence and indicate the condition of man in Australia in an 

 age so remote, we cannot but feel a profound interest. It is at 

 length permissible for us to imagine him to have been in conflict 

 with the great Marsupials, fearsome reptiles, and other enormi- 

 ties of the prolific Nototherian age, and in his generation to 

 have witnessed the vast physical changes which time has wrought 

 upon his dwelling-place — changes on the whole so inimical to 

 animal life that he was left with scarce a tithe of his former 

 means of subsistence. 



Permissible also is it for us to hope that this record is an 

 earnest of further discovery of the kind. 



The proof of its stratigraphical association with the other 

 bones mentioned by Mr. Kent, although without bearing on the 

 question of its genuiness as an implement, may by the way be 

 stated. It is supplied by a peculiar phase of mineralisation 

 common to all of them in the form of a secondary impregnation 

 with a cementation by iron pyrites to quite an unusual extent. 

 Mr. Vale, in one of his letters, remarks that this impregnation 

 was much more evident in the fossil implement when first 

 examined by him than it became after much handling ; at pi"e- 

 sent one fails to detect it. 



The bones found with the implement are one and all derived 

 from a species of Kangaroo. They have a special interest of 

 their own, because the occurrence of even so many bones of the 

 same skeleton together being unique, it affords most welcome 

 guides to the identification of Macropodine bones scattered 



