71 



the steleton were found a vast quantity of flint implements, 

 scrapers, arrow-heads, hatchets, and bone awls, worked in a 

 curious manner. Bones of animals, including those of many 

 of the extinct herbivora and carnivora, were likewise found. 

 Behind the head was a stone, another behind the loins, and 

 between the first stone and the head were found two stone 

 implements of the largest size yet found in the caves. It is 

 important to note these discoveries one by one as they are 

 made, as it is out of the total of these finds that new light has 

 been brought to bear on the history of those pre-historic races 

 of men that lived in Europe after the Glacial epoch — aye, and 

 possibly long before that remote period — whose records, hidden 

 away in caverns and fissures, in gravels, in silted-up lakes, and 

 in peat-mosses, are year by year yielding up fresh evidences 

 out of which a new chapter in the history of man will one day 

 most surely be written. 



Dr. Wright introduced some remarks on a new species of 

 Uraster, from the " Forest Marble " of Road, in Wiltshire, by 

 observing that so diligently had the oolitic rocks of our own 

 and neighbouring districts been searched that it was rare to 

 find any new forms of ancient life ; lately, however, he had 

 received from Dr. Parsons, of Bath, a fossil which was quite 

 new; it was a small star-fish, from the "Forest Marble" of 

 Road, Wilts. Dr. Wright observed that it was interesting to 

 note how little these extinct species of star-fish differed from 

 those on our own shores, and how clearly the characters of the 

 genus Uraster were displayed in the new fossil species before 

 them. Some genera or kinds of animals had lived through 

 very long periods of geological time, whilst others had a com- 

 paratively brief span of existence. One of the Urasters from 

 the Lias differed so little from the Uraster ruheus now living on 

 our own shores that it required the practised eye of a trained 

 Naturalist to detect the differences between them ; whilst other 

 congeneric forms of the same class have no living representa- 

 tives. This is one of those interesting problems which engage 

 the mind of the philosophical student of nature — the persis- 

 tence of certain types and the non-persistence of others ; for 



