
AGE OF SURFACE FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF EGYPT AND SOMALILAND. 61 
found on the same horizon with the flakes around them, just as left by the 
workman, and that they have withstood without disturbance, since the 
Quaternary Epoch, the heavy showers that constitute the rainfall of Somali- 
land. According to Petrie’s latest published statements, Paleolithic man— 
of Hottentot type, and great hairiness, one of the marks of his original 
northern habitation—was still inhabiting the valley down to 7000 B.c., and 
being, according to Sir John Evans, of one race, or living in contact of 
the closest kind, with the Paleolithic people in Asia, Africa, and Europe. 
According, however, to the most recent opinion of Professor Petrie, these 
Hottentot-oid hairy Paleolithic Humans were ousted by another race so far 
differentiated from them as to be classed as Caucasian. These statements 
contain enough material for discussion to fill more than the space at our 
disposal here. While being at present unable to accept either the date to 
which Paleolithic man occupied—if he ever did so—the Nile Valley, the 
remarkable somatic characteristics attributed to him, or the ethnic definition 
of the race that supplanted him, one may ask, in passing: Were these 
Caucasians in the Neolithic stage of civilisation ; or were they more advanced 
people who had been living conterminous somewhere with tribes of Palao- 
lithic man? If these Caucasians were Neolithic people, what evidence is 
there against their having made the implements both of Paleolithic and 
Neolithic forms found in association on the high plateaux of Egypt? 
Are not all the puzzling circumstances in the history of the so-called 
Paleolithic implements both in Egypt and Somaliland to be more casily 
explained by supposing that they belong to an Age far less remote than the 
Quaternary—its distance to be reckoned very possibly in hundreds, rather 
than hundreds of thousands, of years? Until, moreover, unimpeachable 
evidence for the age of these implements in their association with remains of 
a contemporary fauna be forthcoming, this most important question cannot 
be held to be a res judicata. Such absolute statements, however, by an 
authority of world-wide acceptance, that the probability of the surface mmple- 
ments of Egypt and Somaliland being, on the evidence so far adduced, 
Palzolithic in age, has reached the ‘verge of certainty,’ can only delay the 
speedy elucidation of the origin, development, and distribution of man in 
the African continent. 


Notes on some Rare Birds in the Lord Derby 
Museum. 
By Henry O. Forses, LL.D. 
I. Note on a Species of Bittern (Zebrilus pumilus) from S. America. 
(Pxiatss I., II.—Ardeide.) 
The two birds figured in the above-quoted plates represent a species of 
Bittern (Zebrilus pumilus), specimens of which are rare in museums. The 
bird is a South American species, which is found ranging from Guiana to 
Central Brazil. In the National Collection there are only four specimens. 
In the Knowsley Museum there were three examples, which came to us as 
part of the bequest to the city by the XIIIth Lord Derby. Unfortunately, 
the sex of none of these seven specimens is known, and nothing also of their 
life history. 
The two birds figured differ greatly, as will be seen, in colouration, the 
one being dark and the other rufous. Both are, nevertheless, considered by 
