THE HUMAN SKULL 145 



contemporaneity. To take an instance which will 

 make my meaning clear, a murderer might bury 

 the remains of his victim, unclothed and destitute 

 of any accompanying objects, in a bank of glacial 

 drift, perhaps even amongst the remains of the 

 elephants of an early age. Years afterwards excava- 

 tion might accidentally reveal the existence of the 

 skeleton of the victim. Would it be right to regard 

 it as having belonged to the date of the mammoth 

 because the two sets of remains were found to- 

 gether ? I have selected a not very likely instance, 

 though a possible one, but any person can easily 

 imagine for himself a score of different ways in 

 which the bones of a man of very much later date 

 might be found in relation of locality to objects 

 of an earlier period. Hence the first thing that one 

 has to do in the case of any given find of human 

 remains, which might be assumed to belong to a 

 remote period, is to make certain that it is to this 

 period that they do belong, and not to one much 

 later. As we shall see from some of the instances I 

 shall bring forward, this is by no means an easy 

 matter, and as a result there are very wide diver- 

 gences of opinion even amongst those most com- 

 petent to speak on such matters, on this very 

 point of age. When Huxley wrote his Man's Place 

 in Nature, in 1863, one of the two skulls to which 

 he directed most of his attention was that found 

 at Engis, in the valley of the Meuse, in Belgium. 

 This skull, he assigned, on the high authority of 

 Sir Charles Lyell, to the mammoth period. Yet 

 according to Deniker, a writer of the present 

 day, this skull only possibly belongs to the 



