Antlqwitij of Man in Victoria. 123 



others, found at the same place, from tlie workmen ; and that he 

 handed it in that condition to Mr. Vale. Mr. de Vis seems to 

 have been very suspicious of the specimen at first, when he found 

 that with a penknife, from a similar piece of Nototherium rib, he 

 could carve a very fair imitation of the fossil. But his suspic- 

 ions were overcome by the assurances that he received, and he 

 concluded that the bone received its present shape from the 

 hands of man, before it was buried 238 feet below the present 

 surface of the ground. 



If this bone had been cut to its present form by man, before 

 it was dropped in the swamp deposit, then man must have been 

 contemporary with some of the Victorian volcanic eruptions. 

 The geological evidence is c(mclusive that the swamp deposits, in 

 which the bone was buried, were earlier than the overlying basalt 

 flow from Mount Buninyong. The cut on this bone is i-egarded 

 as of human origin by, so far as I know, all those who have care- 

 fully examined it, and there is no special reason to doul)t the 

 genuineness of the discovery, or the good faith of the men who 

 found it. Nevertheless, faith in this implement is not so general 

 as I at first believed. It has recently been carefully examined 

 or re-examined by Professor Spencer, Mr. Kenyon, and Mr. T. S. 

 Hall. They allow me to say that they discredit it as proof of 

 the great antiquity of man in Victoria. Mr. de Vis tells me in 

 a lettei- that " with regard to the scraper, when I wrote ' if an 

 implement' I did not intend to imply that it had not been 

 fashioned by the hand of man, for this I believe it to have been 

 (so does Professor Yashenko to whom I showed a cast), but that 

 there lingers in my mind some doubt, whether it was formed 

 before burial or after resurrection. I confess, the doubt arises 

 purely from negative evidence, the absence of signs elsewhere of 

 man in competition with the great marsupials." 



Mr. Howitt tells me that "I do not rely upon the discoveiy of 

 tho l)ones in the Buninyong Mine or the apparent artificial cuts 

 in them ;" and reference to his address to the Australasian 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1898, shows that 

 he even then regarded the evidence of the specimen with con- 

 siderable suspicion. 



I have had the opportunity of showing the specimen to Mr. 

 A. S. Kenyon, whose experience of the stone and bone imple- 



