ioo POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ogy of the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have 

 we been by old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is con- 

 vinced and we are persuaded that we ought to make more liberal 

 grants of time to the geologist, we feel how hard it is to get the 

 chill of poverty out of our bones." Many, however, have at the 

 present day got over this feeling, and of late years the general tend- 

 ency of those engaged upon the question of the antiquity of the 

 human race has been in the direction of seeking for evidence by 

 which the existence of man upon the earth could be carried, back 

 to a date earlier than that of the Quaternary gravels. There is little 

 doubt that such evidence will eventually be forthcoming, but, judg- 

 ing from all probability, it is not in northern Europe that the cradle 

 of the human race will eventually be discovered, but in some part of 

 the world more favored by a tropical climate, where abundant means 

 of subsistence could be procured, and where the necessity for warm 

 clothing did not exist. Before entering into speculations on this 

 subject, or attempting to lay down the limits within which we may 

 safely accept recent discoveries as firmly established, it will be well 

 to glance at some of the cases in which implements are stated to 

 have been found under circumstances which raise a presumption 

 of the existing of man in Pre-glacial, Pliocene, or even Miocene 

 times. 



Flint implements of ordinary palaeolithic type have, for instance, 

 been recorded as found in the eastern counties of England in beds 

 beneath the chalky bowlder clay; but on careful examination the 

 geological evidence has not to my mind proved satisfactory, nor has 

 it, I believe, been generally accepted. Moreover, the archaeological 

 difficulty that man, at two such remote epochs as the Pre-glacial and 

 the Post-glacial, even if the term " glacial " be limited to the chalky 

 bowlder clay, should have manufactured implements so identical in 

 character that they can not be distinguished apart, seems to have 

 been entirely ignored. Within the last few months we have had 

 the report of worked flints having been discovered in the late Plio- 

 cene forest bed of Norfolk, but in that instance the signs of human 

 workmanship upon the flints are by no means apparent to all ob- 

 servers. But such an antiquity as that of the forest bed is as noth- 

 ing when compared with that which would be implied by the discov- 

 eries of the work of men's hands in the Pliocene and Miocene beds 

 of England, France, Italy, and Portugal, which have been accepted 

 by some geologists. There is one feature in these cases which has 

 hardly received due attention, and that is the isolated character of 

 the reputed discoveries. Had man, for instance, been present in 

 Britain during the crag period, it would be strange indeed if the 

 sole traces of his existence that he left were a perforated tooth of a 



