BY R. HAMLYN-HARRIS. 23 



Downs, in 1914, and was Vjiought to the notice of the British 

 Association in .Sydney by Professor Edgeworth David. It 

 was obtained from . a river deposit in which remains of 

 Diprotodon and other extinct marsupials had already been 

 discovered. 



Dr. G. A. Smith, of the Sydney University, read a 

 paper (by proxy) some months ago before the Royal Society 

 of London, and there seems to be some doubt about the 

 date of its publication, but the main substance of the 

 conclusions reached by Dr. Smith are very briefly as follows: — - 



The skull was found under conditions of great 

 geological uncertainty. There is some slight evidence 

 for believing it Pleistocene on geological grounds. . There- 

 fore the main interest of the research is anatomical. Dr. 

 8mith is strongly of the opinion that it is the skull of a not 

 yet adult Proto-Australian which presents a picture of a 

 brain case indistinguishable from that of the })resent day 

 Australian, \\ith a very primitive facial skeleton, in the 

 jaw and teeth of which are some features more primitive 

 than those hitherto described in any human except the 

 PiJtdown. In particular, these features are mainly the 

 great squareness and enormous size of the palate and the 

 enormous size of the teeth and the semi-anthropoid nature 

 of the articulation of the upper canines with their 

 mandibular opponents. 



In this connection it is significant to not« that in 1896 

 Professor S. T>. J. Skertchly found at Talgai in a newly- 

 sunk well in river gravel a couple of rough implements at 

 a depth of about 10 feet under conditions which in England 

 o ■ France he would unhesitatingly have put down as 

 Palaeolitliic. These tools, he informs me, are, or should be, 

 in the collections of the Geological Survey. But it is in 

 the Nerang fhstrict, which Professor Skertchly has worked 

 for some years, that he believes to have obtained 

 indisputable evidence of considerable antiquity in 

 undisturbed deposits. For the remainder 1 let Professor 

 Skertchly speak for himself. " Speaking broadly the 

 -sueeession of beds in the lower Nerang River is as follows : — 



1. Modern blown (dune) sand, and River alluvium. 



2. Old sand dunes. 



