92 EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN. [CHAP. iv. 



by Professor Capellini, 1 to whose kindness I owe the 

 opportunity of examining them in 1876, seem to me 

 to have been notched artificially. In one case, a bone 

 had been partially cut through and broken off at the 

 line of cutting (Fig. 19), in the same way as many cut 

 antlers of stag obtained from the Swiss lake-dwellings. 

 The cuts have been made before the mineralisation of the 

 fragments, one of them in particular being covered with 

 an incrustation of sulphate of barytes. Now they are so 

 hard that they could not be scratched by any stone 

 implement. Along with them were flint flakes and a 

 fragment of rude pottery. It is not, however, to my 

 mind satisfactorily shown that these were obtained from 

 undisturbed strata. Nor is the mineralisation a proof of 

 their high antiquity, since we know how rapidly deposits 

 of sulphate of barytes have sometimes been formed in the 

 the wooden pipes of coal mines. It seems to me more 

 prudent to wait for further proof of the presence of 

 man in Europe at this time, for although it be allowed 

 that the cuts are artificial and made by flint flakes, 

 there is no proof that the mineralisation of the bones 

 may not have taken place in comparatively modern 

 times. Pottery was unknown in Europe in the Pleis- 

 tocene, and therefore is unlikely to have been known in 

 the Pleiocene age. 



There is an argument against the probability of man 

 having lived in Italy in Pleiocene times that seems 

 to me unanswerable. Twenty -one fossil mammalia 

 have been recently proved by Dr. Forsyth Major to 

 have inhabited Tuscany in the Pleiocene age : of these 

 there is only one species, the hippopotamus, now alive. 



1 L'uomo Pliocenico in Toscana, Letta alia Reale Acad. del Lincei. 

 7 May 1876. 



