134 I'KOCKEDIXGS OF.TIIR KOVAL SOCIETY OK QUEENSLAND. 



anthropologists to reach the point I had arrived at in 1878, 

 forty-three years ago, when I made my first announcement of 

 my discoveries in Nature, vol. xvi, pp. 142, 163. 



Having finished my ^lemoir of the Fens I went up to 

 Brandon in Suffolk on its borders, a place already renowned 

 for the pala^ohthic and neolithic iinplements its neighbourhood 

 had yielded. It is now necessary to state briefly the condition 

 of pubHc and scientific o})inion in those da3'S. 



PUBLIC OPINION, LAY AND SCIENTIFIC. 

 The mild and friendly criticism which to-day does duty 

 for the old odium theologicum is hardly generically homologous 

 with the triumphant venomous outpourings against science 

 in general and geology in particular that in my young days 

 did duty for orthodoxy. Even at the social board a grim 

 silence fell if anyone rashly uttered the word '" Evolution."' 

 In 1872 I pubhshed my little Manual of Physical Geography, 

 with wliich the vice-president of the Royal Geographical 

 Society was pleased to be pleased. He was a merchant in a 

 large way, and ordered some hundred copies to gratify Tylor 

 and do me a good turn. But finding something about evolution 

 at the end of it he countermanded the order. No wonder 

 Darwin wrote to Hooker, " I begin to think every man is a 

 fool who w rites a book." You smile at this, but I didn't at the 

 time, but to understand my position it is incumbent that you 

 realise the atmosphere of the seventies. 



In the geological world things were as follows : — The 

 Geological Survey began its work in Cornwall and South 

 Wales, where the pleistocene beds cover but a small area : 

 and as nobody took much interest in them — save in the tin 

 gravels— they were generally ignored on the maps, and all 

 of them, sands, gravels, and clays, lumped together imder the 

 comprehensive term '' Drift." Hence the implements from 

 the gravels were called '" drift implements." As the survey 

 extended northwards these drift- beds took up greater and 

 oreater space, till bj^ the time we were fairly among the glacial 

 beds they occupied pretty well as much ground as those 

 euphemistically called " solid " beds. Still we were expected 

 to ignore them, consequently maps Avere issued with dotted 

 boundaries where the solid beds ran under the drifts, till 

 finally some of the maps showed limestones and sandstones 



