Bibliographical Notices. 65 



With, regard to the head-characters of the " ancient British 

 aboriginal" from Tilbury Marsh, Sir Richard says: — "These are 

 exceptions to the cranial outline in the educated humanity of the 

 actual or recent period, whilst the ' Tilbury skull ' may accord with 

 the rule in the Palaeolithic range of time. Bat the bimanal charac- 

 ters of the skeleton are distinct from quadrumanal ones in the earliest 

 as in the latest and highest races of mankind" (p. 24). In this 

 statement we do not find anything new. 



Whether the old man of Tilbury (evidently endowed with great 

 brute force, though perhaps with a low intellect) was one of tha 

 earliest of men i3 very doubtful. The cursory popular sketch of the 

 history of the river- deposits at Tilbury (pp. 24-27) does not carry 

 much geological weight ; for the history of the order and changes of 

 deposition and transportation of debris, and of the local accumula- 

 tion of peat in the lower reaches of a large river must be very exact 

 before definite conclusions can be arrived at ; nor can the indefinite 

 " mud," which alternates with the peat, yield much information to 

 either the geologist or the general reader. The gravel at the bottom 

 of the section may, on one hand, be a deposit made by the river 

 at an early period, when the land stood higher than at present, and 

 may have been either fluviatile or estuarine. On the other hand, 

 the river may have scooped out a deep channel more or less suddenly 

 at a late period and left a bedding of gravel at the subsidence of that 

 activity. In either case, if any " palaeolithic " implements be found 

 in that gravel, they must have been either washed in from older de- 

 posits or dropped by man then living on the banks, fishing, canoeing, 

 or crossing the ice. The sand, 12 feet thick, with the bones, lying on 

 that gravel, may have been deposited after a long or a short interval 

 of time. It is not stated that the man imbedded in the upper part 

 of this sand-bed had any jpaheoliths with him to prove his contempo- 

 raneity with the deeper gravel, " known as < ballast,' in which 

 flint implements (? pakeoliths) are more commonly found " (p. 22), 

 or with any really palaeolithic deposit. 



The author sketches the life and habits of a prehistoric Briton, 

 with his "unpolished adze of flint" (pp. 14-17), or ''a British 

 palaeolithic riverside man ; " and he takes for granted that, of the 

 horizons in brick-earths, sands, and gravels, at which Mr. W. (>. 

 Smith and others have found palaeoliths near London, some at . 

 least must be the same as that of the sand in which the Tilbury 

 man has been met with. For this supposed correlation there is 

 really no ground. Mr. W. G. Smith expressed a hope (in the 

 'Transactions of the Essex Eield-Club,' 1883, p. 142) that bodily 

 remains of the river-drift men, who inhabited the area marked by 

 the " palaeolithic floor " (stretching across the ancient surface of a 

 great part of Middlesex and adjoining lands before the valleys were 

 cut out to their present levels) would be some day found. To this 

 skeleton at Tilbury Sir Richard seems to believe that he can point, 

 as one of the desiderated men older than those of the caves, and 

 " who lived on the river-margins, and others who lived before the 

 present rivers flowed"' (W. Gr. Smith, loc. tit.). 



Ann. d> Mag. N. I fist. Ser. 5, Vol. xv. 5 



