LIFE OF DB. ROLLESTON. lxiii 



body. There's that testimonial I have written for you, and I've 

 put your name down at the Athenseum.' The present writer saw 

 him in London just starting, full of his old interests, and far less 

 troubled for himself than for his unfinished work. In the hot 

 bright climate of the Riviera his strength revived, and his old 

 capacity for enjoying nature showed itself still strong in him. 

 He went to Nice, and there with Mr. Alfred Tylor examined the 

 human jawbone lately found imbedded in the hill-side, apparently 

 in remote prehistoric times. The description written by him of 

 this jaw was his last scientific paper 1 . A few days later he moved 

 to Bordighiera, whence he wrote home to his family a description 

 of the hills clothed with olives to their tops, and the oranges and 

 lemons and ' real date-palms ' below. On his way with Mr. 

 George Macdonald to visit Mr. Thomas Hanbury at La Mortola, 

 he pleased himself in picturing how different an aspect the land- 

 scape would have presented to the prehistoric man he had lately 

 been describing — only the hills and pines the same, the now 

 characteristic fruit-trees of the region not yet come from Asia. 

 The tropical vegetation of the gardens of La Mortola raised in 

 his mind a glow of pleasure, expressed in another home letter. 

 A few weeks later, having gone on to Corsica, he writes to one 

 of his sons that he had there found a young General in the 

 Mexican service who could neither read nor write, but who had 



1 At Prof. Turner's suggestion, the following extract is taken from this memorandum, 

 which is too unfinished for printing in extenso. ' These bones . . . were found in dig- 

 ging the cellar of a little country house about a mile out of Nice, about 10 feet down 

 in a deposit of river sand mixed with calcareous matter, in which fresh-water snail 

 shells were found. The bones had been thrown out in spadesful of the deposit, but 

 Mons. Joachim [the proprietor] was clear that they had formed an intrinsic part 

 of the deposit itself. Now this deposit is far above the level of any stream in that 

 locality at present, and it is above the level of terraces very like those now made by 

 the proprietors in this district for olives: and due, like the similar ones at Amiens, to 

 the action of a quaternary pluvial period. So it must have been much older than 

 they, and indeed deposited before the river had become as small and the valley as 

 large by a very great deal as it is now.' The lower jaw in question is very im- 

 perfect, the angle is strongly marked for the masseter muscle, mentum feeble, alveolar 

 part of front relatively long, sockets for incisors small ; there are 3 molars and 

 1 pre-molar, very little worn, and Dr. Eolleston judged the jaw to have belonged to 

 a woman nearer 18 than 24. 



