220 NATURAL SCIENCE [October 
Canadian geology—treated by Dr George M. Dawson in his admir- 
able address to Section C at Toronto. Sir John Evans’ address as 
President of the British Association, however, is one to interest 
even, the least scientific of the general public. It is a valuable 
expression of opinion of one of the foremost minds upon the 
question of the Antiquity of Man, and recent attempts in Europe 
to carry the human period backwards much further than the 
Palaeolithic gravels. As might be expected, Sir John Evans’ 
opinions are conservative. The engraved Pliocene shell, Pectunculus, 
is dismissed with ridicule. For the asserted Indian Miocene man 
he accepts the explanation ably advanced in Natwral Science by Mr 
R. D. Oldham; the form of the fractured flints of the Cromer 
Forest Bed he attributes to natural fractures; he wishes for more 
evidence as to the age of the beds which yielded Pithecanthropus 
erectus, and the claims advanced in favour of ‘ Eolithic’ man from 
the high level gravels near Sevenoaks, he considers, as he did in 
1890, to be still unproved. In all these points we regard Sir 
John Evans’ scepticism as healthy; and as he is unquestionably 
one of the best living authorities on stone implements, his opinion 
must carry great weight. The asserted pre-Glacial man of East 
Anglia, based on implements supposed to have been found beneath 
the glacial deposits, the recent excavations by Mr Clement Reid 
seem to have conclusively disproved. And in the other cases 
referred to the evidence is either wholly discredited or still 
inconclusive. ; 
The most remarkable expression of opinion called forth by 
this learned and calmly scientific exposition of the facts was an 
astounding leading article in The Times. Most of the scientific 
members of the staff of that paper seem to have gone to 
Canada, and the reactionary journalists apparently resolved to 
make the most of their opportunity. Accordingly, we read con- 
cerning archaeology, in the first leading article of August 19th, 
that— 
“ All its speculations upon neolithic and palaeolithie man aré 
founded upon a single observation, as yet completely unrelated, save 
by the loosest conjecture, with any other portion of human know- 
ledge. That observation is that flints, chipped or polished in a 
manner for which natural agencies do not seem to account, have 
been found in certain deposits at widely-separated points on the 
surface of the globe. That they were chipped by man as we know 
him is a mere conjecture. How they came to be so widely dis- 
tributed is a question that baftles even the licence of surmise. 
Geology does not attempt to fix within a thousand centuries the 
age of the beds in which they are found; and geological specula- 
tions themselves rest upon assumptions which may be plausible 
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