Skction il, 1885. [ ] 19 J Trans. Roy. Soo. Canada. 



VII. — PahvolitMc Dexterity. 



By Daniel, Wilson, LL.D., F.R.S.E., Presideut of University College, Toronto. 



(Presented May 28, 1885.) 



The discoveries of recent years in the department of prehistoric archncology have 

 greatly extended our knowledge of the history of the human race ; and have opened to us 

 vistas through which we already look on many novel revelations such as, at no very 

 distant period, it would have seemed presumptuous folly to imagine possible. We are as 

 yet but on the threshold of such disclosures, and only imperfectly interpret the newly 

 discovered chronicle. I propose now briefly to indicate a very subordinate, yet not wholly 

 insignificant, glimpse at one attribute of man characteristic of him throughout the Historic 

 Period ; but on which some light appears to be thrown by the recovered knowledge con- 

 cerning that strange epoch, when he was the contemporary of the mammoth, and of the 

 long extinct carnivora of the caves, and the world of men was still in its childhood. Of 

 the remoteness of the period thus appealed to there can, on any estimate of the age of 

 man, be no room for doubt. It is abimdantly demonstrated by the climatic changes affect- 

 ing Europe in the interval since the fauna of southern France approximated to those of 

 Lapland and Siberia, or to our own Hudson Bay Territory at the present time. 



The assignment of the primitive relics of human art to a Stone Period, when the 

 use of metals was unknown, and man had to furnish his implements and weapons solely 

 from such accessible materials as wood, horn, bone, shell, stone, or flint, has naturally 

 given a novel importance to this class of relics ; and we owe to the pen of Dr. John Evans, 

 not only an exhaustive review of the ancient stone implements, weapons, and ornaments 

 of G-reat Britain, but also, incidentally, of the world's Stone Age, in nearly all countries 

 and periods. In this work, accordingly, some of the earliest traces of man's handiwork, 

 as the manipulator and tool-maker, are described. Of these, the implements of the River- 

 drift Period are at once the rudest and most primitive in character. They occur in vast 

 numbers, among the rolled gravel of the ancient fresh water, or river-drifts, which belong 

 to what has receiA^ed from the included implements the name of the Palccolithic Period; 

 and if they are correctly assumed to represent the sole appliances of the man of the Drift 

 Period, they indicate a singularly rude stage. In reality, however, the large, rude almond 

 and tongue-shaped implements of flint are nearly imperishable ; while trimmed flakes, 

 small daggers or arrow-heads, and other delicately fashioned flint implements, — as well as 

 any made of more perishable materials, such as shell, wood, or bone, — vawat have been 

 fractured in the violence to which the rolled gravels were subjected, or would perish by 

 natural decay. 



It is not necessary, for the purpose of this paper, to discuss the relative age of the 

 river-drift and cave implements. The most modern date assigned to them will amply 

 suffice. The deposition of the implement-bearing river gravels, undoubtedly extended 



