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ments are made in a very perfect manner. I am, however, not sufficiently 

 experienced in the forms of tools and weapons made by other peoples to 

 be able to say anything further than that I have had great pleasure in 

 listening to Dr. Dawson's admirable paper. It has been a source of much 

 instruction to me. 



Mr. E. Charlesworth, F.G.S. (a Visitor). — I can only express the 

 interest with which I have listened to the paper read by Dr. Dawson. 

 There are one or two points on which I may be allowed to remark, without 

 very deeply trenching on the rule the Chairman has laid down. My friend, 

 the eminent mineralogist and geologist Professor Warington Smyth, has 

 referred to the French investigator M. Boucher de Perthes ; but we ought 

 to remember that long before his time a native of this country, resident in 

 Norfolk, Mr. Frere, had in reality laid the foundation upon which geologists 

 have since carried man back to the period of the mammoth. Nobody 

 believed him at the time his paper was laid before the Eoyal Society, 

 although it was printed in their Transactions, the fact being that the whole 

 learned world read that paper, discredited it, and entirely forgot it. There- 

 fore, when we quote M. Boucher de Perthes, and give him credit for having 

 reminded us of the state of things which existed so long ago, we ought not 

 to forget that the whole question of the origin of man, and the evidences 

 carrying him back to the period of the mammoth, was argued by one of our 

 own countrymen before the researches of M. Boucher de Perthes were com- 

 menced. I may here be allowed to make a remark on which perhaps 

 Dr. Dawson will give his opinion. One of the things that have greatly 

 puzzled me, and which I mentioned at a meeting of the Victoria Institute 

 on a recent occasion, is the fact that whUe these flint implements 

 are found in such vast abundance in the gravels around London and in 

 Norfolk and other parts of the kingdom, there are but very few that exhibit 

 any traces of abrasion. As a boy I lived in Suffolk, and used to spend a 

 great deal of my time among the gravels of that county hunting for fossils 

 — principally the fossil sea-urchin. I found in those searches that a large 

 proportion of the fossils were much rubbed and worn. Here and there 

 there might be one in a tolerably perfect state, but the majority were much 

 abraded ; whereas if we see a collection of flint implements we invariably 

 find that there are scarcely any signs of abrasion on any of them. They 

 are found side by side with the fossil urchins and other things which are 

 abraded, and I should like to know how it is that the flints present so little 

 trace of the same action. Another point on which Dr. Dawson might 

 kindly enlighten us is this : As a resident in America, he is doubtless familiar 

 with a vast number of the implements found on that continent. Can he 

 tell us, approximately, what is the geological age of those implements ? 

 Both the mammoth and mastodon are found in association with them there ; 

 but in this country we find the mastodon only, that mammal being later 

 than the mammoth in geological history. Is any portion of the beautiful 

 arrow-heads and other flint implements of America carried back in that 

 region to the mammoth period ? Dr. Dawson spoke very cautiously of finding 



