ON CUTS ON BONE IN REMOTE AGES. 219 
and might have told us a great deal more as to the power of 
these different fish, and the sort of fish they were. However, he 
also has quite confirmed the fact that fish could do this kind of 
work, and has told us that a great many bones are found in other 
formations scored in the way described. The one important point 
in which my bone is better than all those other bones is that on it 
we see a little oyster and polyzoon which grew on the place which 
was scored, thus proving the contemporaneity of the cuts with the 
deposit in which the bone was found. If I had gone on to the 
general subject, I should have brought in the cut and sawn bones 
described by Capellini and Prestwich, but Iam very fond, when 
Ihave a good strong point, of sticking to it. I know I have here a 
thing on which no one can upset me. ‘Therefore I did not bring in 
other things about which there might have been a great many 
questions raised. That is the excuse I give for not having enlarged 
the scope of my argument. 
But the general question of the antiquity of man* is, of course, 
raised by this subject, and I will endeavour to answer the questions 
that have been put to me, even when they do not bear directly 
upon the matter before us, which does not itself admit of much 
discussion. 
* Professor M’Kenny Hughes has more than once done valuable 
service by carefully examining the geological evidence upon which argu- 
ments in favour of the extreme antiquity of man have been founded, 
and has shown that that evidence “ has completely broken down in all cases 
where it has been attempted to assign him to a period more remote than the 
post-glacial river gravels.” Speaking on the advent of man, Sir W. Dawson, 
K.C.M.G., F.R.S., says :—“ How man came to be, is, independently of 
Divine revelation, an impenetrable mystery—one which it is doubtful if in 
all its bearings science will ever be competent to solve. Yet there are 
legitimate scientific questions of great interest relating to the time and 
manner of his appearance, and to the condition of his earlier existence and 
subsequent history, which belong to geology. . . . . While we 
have no certain data for assigning a definite number of years to the 
residence of man on the earth, we have no geological evidence for the rash 
assertion often made that in comparison with historical periods the date 
of the earliest races of men recedes into a dim, mysterious, and measureless 
antiquity. On the basis of that Lyellian principle of the application of 
modern causes to explain past changes, which is the stable foundation of 
modern geology, we fail to erect any such edifice as the indefinite antiquity 
of man, or to extend this comparatively insignificant interval to an equality 
with the long wons of the preceding Tertiary. The demand for such in- 
definite extension of the history of man rests not on geological facts, but 
on the necessities of hypotheses which, whatever their foundation, have no 
basis in the discoveries of that science, and are not required to account for 
the sequence which it discloses,”—Ep. 
Q 2 
