; 
| 
3 
+ 
7, 
The President’s Address. 21 
a discovery of my own, although in introducing it into so brief 
and condensed an account of the history of the subjeet I must 
again claim your indulgence as a lecturer. Being in Egypt in 
1881, and having devoted particular attention to this point, I was 
fortunate enough to find flint flakes and an implement in parts of 
the gravel of the Nile near Thebes, into which gravel, after it had 
become nearly as hard as rock by exposure, the Egyptians had cut 
the square-topped chambers of their tombs, and I ehiselled several 
of these implements out of the gravel beneath stratified seams of 
sand and loam in the sides of the Egyptian tombs themselves. 
These flints, I believe, afforded the first absolute evidence of the 
priority of the use of flint implements to the time of the building 
of Thebes, and to a time before the Valley of the Tombs of the 
Kings had been completely eroded. At any rate it was the first 
discovery of the kind which had been recorded. I exhibit a section 
of these gravels, showing the position of the flints and of the tombs, 
and the seams of gravel, and the implements themselves are also 
exhibited. I have not been able to go to Egypt since, but I believe 
that by further search upon that site it may be possible to determine 
when flint implements were first introduced there, for I could not, 
after careful search, find them deeper in the gravel than a certain 
level. If this should prove to be the case it will be an important 
additional item of evidence. As regards the osteology of the human 
skeletons discovered in the drift, our knowledge of them appears to 
develope slowly. If, as I have said, the skeletons of the Ancient 
Britons are rare, still less frequent must be those of quaternary man, 
our knowledge of which must depend on the accidental washing of 
them into drift deposits, or the discovery of them in the floors of 
caves belonging to that period. For some time it was contended 
that no approach towards lower forms of life could be recognised in 
the skeletons of this period, and that the one or two abnormal skulls 
that had been brought to light were either those of idiots or were 
the result of disease. But in the presence of additional discoveries 
of similar skulls and skeletons that have since been made in different 
parts of the world, and more particularly in Belgium, this position 
ean no longer be maintained. Within the last year two additional 
