GLACIAT. jVrAX. — SKERTCHLY. 129 



GLACIAL MAN: 



MY PART IN HIS DISCOVERY. 



By Sydney B. J. Skertchly, 

 Late of H. M. Geological Survey of England, Past President. 



{Delivered before the Royal Society of Queensland, 27th April, 



1921.) 



INTRODUCTORY. 



It is quite appropriate that I should address you on the 

 subject of the Antiquity of Man. Me voila ! 



My discovery of the remains of glacial man was no 

 fortuitous accident, but the culmination of a long and strict 

 training. If like my predecessor the late Mr. Jack Homer I 

 put in my thumb and pulled out a plum, it was not that I had 

 stumbled upon the pastry, but that I had studied the ways 

 of the cook, and knew where she got her raw material. 



My very earliest memory is a distinct vision of a joyful 

 moment in a gravel-pit. Amid vague, dark-flitting sur- 

 roundings my mind's eye still pictures a long garden, quite 

 without detail ; but clear and bright, a beacon in the gloom, 

 comes the remembrance and the smell of enchanting red- 

 brown gravel stones that m}^ infant fingers fondled. Always 

 clumsy, I was constantly being picked up -wdth abraded knee- 

 caps and OS frontalis : my earliest ailment was gravel-rash, 

 I am gravel-rash still. Gravel has yielded me my choicest 

 quarry in each of the globe's four quarters, and as the sands of 

 life run out, to gravel I still turn unsated, for Australia's 

 river-banks are yielding me treasures valuable as those of 

 Europe and America, and equally despised, for, though I 

 have been telling you about them for five years, not a single 

 one of you has had the curiosity to take a three hours' journey 

 to see the evidence. It may please you to know the Nerang 

 River is sick with waiting and is rapidly erasing the writing 

 on the wall you would not read. 



About my ninth year we removed to Ashby-de-la-Zouch, 

 famed in '" Ivanhoe," near which my father was establishing 



