ANTIQUITY OF MAN. 231 



well known to geologists that the coast of Scotland 

 shows evidence that it was twenty-five feet, possibly 

 forty feet, lower in the early human period than it is 

 at present. Mr. Milne Home has very recently given 

 some interesting illustrations of this in the valley of 

 the Forth, where skeletons of whales occur in the 

 carse of Stirling, at an elevation of twenty or thirty 

 feet above the sea, and with them were found pointed 

 instruments of deer's horn. In the West of Scotland, 

 also, numerous canoes, cut out of solid logs of wood, 

 have been disinterred from marine beds now twenty 

 feet or more above the level of the sea. Human bones 

 have also been found in Cornwall in elevated beds 

 covered with marine shells ; and in Sardinia there are 

 said to be old beaches no less than from 230 to 234 

 feet above the level of the Mediterranean, with frag- 

 ments of pottery associated with sea shells. * 



We do not certainly know that these depressions 

 were contemporaneous, but they all belonged to the 

 early human period, and if this depression extended 

 from Sweden to the Mediterranean, and amounted to 

 from fifty to one hundred feet in the valley of the 

 Somine, it would give precisely the state of things in 

 which the lower part of that valley might be a sort of 

 delta, with banks of gravel to which aborigines of the 

 country might resort for materials for their imple- 

 ments, or into which their rejected or lost implements 

 might be drifted, and these aborigines would be con- 

 temporaries of the drowned men of Stangeness, in 

 * Lyell, " Antiquity of Man," p. 115. 



