410 WARREN UPHAM, ESQ., M.A., F.G.S.A.. ON 
glaciation was approximately synchronous, with parallelism 
in its beginning, fluctuations, and end, through a period ten 
to twenty times as long as that which has followed it, or of 
somewhat such ratio. In other words, the Glacial period, 
from the time of the Paleolithic men at Menchecourt and 
St. Acheul to the Neolithic immigration and the not widely 
later retreat of the ice-sheet in Scotland, Sweden, and Nor- 
way, measured probably 50,000 or 100,000 years. 
It is therefore right that the Acheulian men should be 
termed primitive. ‘They had not learned how to use God's 
gifts. The power of invention, ready to bestow dominion 
and utilization of animate and inanimate nature, lay dormant 
and was scarcely beginning to awaken. 
The beginning of the human epoch, when our species 
gained such development of body and mind as to deserve its 
generic and specific name, Homo sapiens, we cannot well 
designate more closely than to say that it antedated the Ice 
age. But however long we may ‘estimate the duration of the 
human species, geology confidently affirms that life began 
upon our globe in an antiquity a hundred or perhaps even a 
thousand times more remote, and the beginning of the exis- 
tence of the earth and of the solar system was again vastly 
more ancient. The duration of the period of written history, 
or even of mankind, beginning tens or hundreds of thousands 
of years earlier, seems like the span of one’s hand in com- 
parison with geologic time, which was in the mind of the seer 
writing of the Creator’s work, “Of old hast Thou laid the 
foundation of the earth.” 
DISCUSSION. 
The Cuairman.—Would any lady or gentleman like to make 
any remarks on this very interesting paper ? 
The Secretary (Professor Hutt).—Mr. Chairman, I wish to 
move the best thanks of the meeting to the author of this paper, 
which I am sure you will all concur with me in considering of 
great interest, and showing a large amount of research and labour 
m preparation. In writing to me since this paper was in type, 
the author begged that I would not only read it but that I would 
also take part in the discussion. I thought it was rather cruel to put 
two such severe tasks upon me in one evening: but as the Chairman 
has kindly in part relieved me in the first matter I feel I may, and 
ought to, meet the wishes of the author. 
