68 EAELY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. in. 



splinters of flint 1 found in the mid Meiocene strata at 

 Thenay by the Abbe Bourgeois, 2 and on a notched frag- 

 ment of a rib of an extinct kind of manatee (Halitherium) 

 found at Pouance by M. Delaunay. The data seem to 

 me insufficient to establish the fact that man was a 

 contemporary of the Deinothere and other members 

 of the mid Meiocene fauna. Is it possible for the 

 flints in question, which are very different from the 

 Palaeolithic implements of the caves and river deposits, 

 to have been chipped or the bone to have been notched 

 without the intervention of man ? If we cannot assert 

 the impossibility, we cannot say that these marks prove 

 that man was living in this remote age in the earth's 

 history. If they be artificial, then I would suggest that 

 they were made by one of the higher apes then living 

 in France rather than by man. As the evidence stands 

 at present, we have no satisfactory proof either of the 

 existence of man in the Meiocene or of any creature 

 nearer akin to him than the anthropomorphous apes. 

 These 3 views agree with those recently published by 

 Professor Gaudry, 4 who suggests that the chipped flints 

 and the cut rib may have been the work of the Dryo- 

 piihecus, or the great anthropoid ape, then living in 

 France. I am, however, not aware that any of the 



1 A collection of these flints is to be seen in the museum at St. Ger- 

 main, some of which appeared to me, in 1876, non-artificial, while others 

 had evidently, from the state of their surfaces, been exposed to the atmo- 

 sphere for a considerable time. Those figured by Professor Gaudry (Les 

 Enchainements, p. 239) are, to all appearance, artificial. 



2 Congres Intern. Prdhist. ArcheoL, Paris vol. p. 67 et seq.; Brussels 

 vol. p. 81 et seq. 



3 This was written in September 1877, and used in the Owen's College 

 Lectures of November 1877. 



4 Les Enchainements, p. 241. 



