December 27, 1894] 



NA TURE 



195 



every stage of manufacture, from the unshaped block to 

 the finished hdche. There are the flint cores and the 

 flakes lying beside them, there are flint hammer-stones 

 and anvils, punches and scrapers, and other implements 

 broken in various stages of manufacture. Very few of 

 the latter are finished. They would, of course, be 

 carried off for use, as was the case with those of the 

 palaeolithic floor discovered some ten years ago, in the 

 brickpit at Crayford, by Mr. Flaxman Spurrell. Mr. 

 Smith, we may remark, has followed the e.xample of the 

 latter, in the infinite pains he has taken to build up the 

 original forms of the flint blocks from the broken im- 

 plements and splinters. It is clear that in this place we 

 have the workshop in the condition in which it was left 

 by the paleolithic hunter. The fact that no bones and 

 no charcoal have been discovered, shows that the palaeo- 

 lithic huts were some little distance away, and that this 

 spot was selected solely for the purpose of implement- 

 making. 



The association of the ruder with the more finished 

 of the palaeolithic implements in this floor, as in the case 

 of many of the paktolithic caverns, proves that a., appeal 

 to rudeness of form as a test of age, is a wrong principle. 

 That man must have learnt first of all tjo make the 

 simpler before he made the more comple.x implements, 

 is so obvious, that it has never been disputed. The 

 ruder, however, were used side by side with the more 

 finished, and many of those forms which are taken to be 

 of pre-palasolithic age in the gravels of the Kentish 

 plateau are the necessary result of the working of the 

 flint block into the palaeolithic hdciie. We may remark, 

 further, that some of these are also found in the refuse- 

 heaps round the old flint-mines of Cissbury, and have 

 been made in the manufacture of neolithic implements. 



In the introduction, Mr. Smith deals with the 

 general question of the relation of paleolithic man to 

 the glacial period, and concludes, rightly in our 

 opinion, that man inhabited south-eastern England after 

 the glacial period. We also agree with him in looking at 

 the pre-glacial or post-glacial age of man as merely of 

 local significance, because the glacial period is a purely 

 local phenomenon not marked in the warmer southern 

 lands, such as the Indian peninsula, which was inhabited 

 by the paleolithic hunter. We know of him in India 

 simply as living in the pleistocene age. He probably in- 

 vaded Kurope in the pre-glacial age, and lived in 

 the south while Britain lay buried under a mass of 

 glaciers, or was covered by a berg-laden sea. He is 

 post-glacial in the valley of the Thames. He is not 

 separated from our own times either by a wall of ice — 

 one of the ice periods of Prof. James (leikie— or by 

 the tumultuous waters of a vast deluge, such as 

 that recently put before us by -Sir Henry Howorth. 

 He is separated by a geographical revolution during 

 which the seaboard of north-western Europe, as we find 

 it now, came into being, and Britain became an island — 

 as well as by a change in our land from a continental to 

 an insular climate. 



The author also touches the difficult problem of the 

 physique of primeval man, and he accepts the "type de 

 Canstadt" as the earliest pakeolithic race. This is, 

 however, founded on a human skull which M. 

 d'Acy has conclusively proved to have no claim to any 

 NO. I313, VOL. 51] 



definite age. According to the evidence of the catalogue, 

 still preserved, of the pleistocene maminalia found at 

 Canstadt in 1700, it was not found along with them. Dr. 

 Reissel, who superintended the exploration for the Duke 

 of Wiirtemberg, wrote in 1701 that no human remains 

 were then found, " inter que tamen nulla humanis 

 possunt comparari.'' Some fifty years later Dr. Albrecht 

 Gessner, writing on the discovery, remarks that it is 

 strange that no human remains had been met with. 

 Both these were doctors to the Dukes of Wiirtemberg, 

 and can only be supposed to know a human skull when 

 they saw it. It was not until 1835 that the skull in 

 question was found by Dr. Jaeger, in the Museum at 

 Stuttgart, and assigned without proof of any kind to the 

 find made 135 years before. It is very unfortunate that 

 such faulty evidence as this should not only be accepted 

 by the authors of " Crania Ethnica," but also used for 

 the definition of the type " de la plus vieille des races 

 humaines." In the present unsatisfactory state of the 

 inquiry into the physique of paleolithic man, the only 

 safe course is to subject all the facts which have been 

 recorded to the most searching criticism, and to wait for 

 the further light which will come sooner or later from new 

 discoveries. In this small and well-illustrated mono- 

 graph, Mr. Smith has made our knowledge of the paleo- 

 lithic workshop more definite than it was before, and 

 has collected together a mass of information which will 

 be of great service to the archeologists of London. 



W. Boyd Dawkins. 



THE SEQUENCE OF STUDIES. 

 Physiology for Beginners. By Professor M. Foster, 



M.A.,"m.D., F.R.S., and Lewis E. Shore, M.A., M.D. 



(London: Macmillan and Co., 1S94.) 

 Outlines of Biology. By P. Chalmers Mitchell, M. A., 



F.Z.S. (London: Methuen and Co., 1894.) 

 Practical Methods iti Microscopy. By C. H. Clark 



A.M. (Boston: Heath and Co., 1894.) 



THE scientific precision and modernness of a book 

 of elementary physiology, written by Dr. Shore, 

 under the supervision of Prof Foster, is scarcely to be 

 called in question. This little volume is amply ill ustrated. 

 and written with clearness as well as exactness. The 

 authors are especially to be commended for laying stress 

 in their preface upon the necessity of a preliminary 

 acquaintance with Chemistry and Physics, and it is to 

 be regretted that they had not the courage to insist upon 

 this point. But here they are gravely open to criticism. 

 " Knowing," they say, " how frequently a book on 

 physiology is taken up without any such previous ac- 

 quaintance, we have given a few chemical and physical 

 facts as preliminaries in chapter i." A few, and quite 

 too few, it is — six complete pages — expanding scarcely 

 any of the principles which are involved in the simplest 

 physiological explanation, giving, of course, no concep- 

 tions of the relations of chemical combination to energy, 

 nor of osmose, diffusion, solution, isomerism, nor the 

 action of ferments, all of which come to the front directly 

 one approaches respiration or digestion. We cannot but 

 think that this concession to a common educational 

 error is greatly to be deplored. The authors occupy a 

 I position of authority, and it was their privilege— a privi- 



