LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 201 
conclusion of its author, as to the age to which the individual 
is to be assigned, is mercilessly cut up by Dr. Emil Werth, who 
has shown that he belonged to about the middle of the Glacial 
period. He shows that H. heidelbergensis does not represent the 
Diluvial Eolithic age (so-called), still less is he a type of sucha 
creature as Tertiary man; and that “the end of the Tertiary 
period was as remotely behind him as his ancient Chellean 
culture is behind us.”* It seems that this criticism from Werth 
appeared too late for the use of Professor Windle, F.R.S., in the 
new edition of his valuable work, Remains of the Prehistoric 
Age in England (new ed.), p. 307. 
Within the last few weeks, another most important “ find” has 
turned up,f this time a fairly complete skeleton of a Paleolithic 
homo, in the Dordogne, which has been identified as of the 
early Mousterian age, and therefore nearly contemporaneous 
with the homo of the Neckar Valley. The remains have been 
carefully preserved and removed to Paris for complete examina- 
tion. Here again no evidence appears to be forthcoming, which 
would date the appearance of the homo further back than 
20,000 years. 
And as regards the time-age of “man,” in the wider sense, 
upon this planet, if we accept the conclusions of Dr. G. F. 
Wright, and his American geological confréres,t drawn from 
what appears valid evidence, and allow 10,000 years since the 
retreat of the ice§ and if we further accept the latest con- 
clusions of the French savants, in allowing 20,000 years to 
carry us back to the beginning of the Mousterian age, with 
its lowest possible degree of culture, as the artefacts of that age 
prove, there is not much left behind that, which we can assign 
with any great degree of certainty to the presence even of the 
homo. And as regards the intermediate periods, the Solutrean 
and the Madelainean, there may have been a certain amount of 
temporal overlap, so that mere addition of inferred time-periods 
may mislead us as to the aggregate. 
With such increasing evidence, as it comes to be sifted, we are 
surely warned more and more against following the specula- 
tions of some, who, upon very flimsy evidence, attempt to date 
* See Nature, Nov. 25th, 1909, p. 105 ; also Globus, Bd. xcvi, No. 1 
(Vieweg, Braunschweig). 
t See Mature, Feb. 24th, 1910 (and the photograph of “la Squelette 
de la Ferrasie” in La Na ture, 25 Décembre, 1909, p. 51). 
é Trans. Vict. Inst., vol. xl. 
The late Sir Joseph Prestwich, F.R.S., the Oxford Professor of 
Geology, arrived at a similar conclusion. 
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