y^inc 7, 1877] 



NA TURE 



107 



boulder clay, and we were then left to the palaeontological evidence. 

 With regard to the possible correlation of other deposits found in 

 the south of England with the deposits which preceded the glacial 

 period in the north, there was evidence in both areas of the land 

 having been inhabited previous to the boulder clay period by 

 animals which were likely to serve as the food of man. There 

 was no () priori reason why man should not have existed before 

 that period. Much would have to depend upon that complete 

 paliEontologieal evidence which possibly Mr. Tiddeman might 

 have at some future period to bring before them rather than 

 upon geological position. He was disposed to consider with 

 Mr. Tiddeman that the cave he was now investigating might be 

 of pre-glacial age. He thought that the evidence rather tended 

 to show it was pre-glacial, but it was not conclusive. What 

 might be decided upon that particular point must, however, 

 depend upon further research. Taking again the valley of the 

 Thames, we found flint implements in terraces raised some 

 twenty, thirty, or forty feet above the present level of the river. 

 At Reculver we found such evidence of the existence of man 

 in a gravel eighty (eet high, but as we ascended the valley we 

 found the flint implements confined to the lower levels. At 

 Reading no flint implements or mammalians are found in the 

 high-level gravel. So also in the neighbourhood of Oxford 

 mammalian remains and implements are found in the low-level 

 pravel but none in the higher. Thus at the entrance of the 

 Thames valley near to France we find evidence of man in the 

 later high-level gravels, but man had not then penetratediinto the 

 Upper Thames valley. It was evident that at the period that 

 those higher ten aces were deposited in the upper valley of the 

 Thames as far down as Maidenhead, very cold conditions per- 

 vaded, though post-glacial to the boulder clay. In the neighboui- 

 hood of Oxford there have been found in this upper gravel boulders 

 of several tons in weight which had been carried from a very 

 longdistance, and he had recently observed in the neighbourhood 

 of Reading s ime high-level gravel resting upon an ice-pitted 

 surface of stiff clay in which there was no calcareous matter, 

 presenting that sort of section (drawing it on the black board). 

 A surface the size of that room was exposed. It seemed to him, 

 however, that with respect to pre-glacial man there was an im- 

 portant " suspense account " now accumulating. In Fiance an 

 large series of observations had been made by competent 

 observers, and it would not do to ignore the points they had 

 brought forward. He had some reason now to believe fiom his 

 own observations that there was evidence of man being pre- 

 glacial even in the north of France. He also produced one 

 specimen from the Red Crag which had been in his possession lor 

 many years. He could not answer for the labelling but only for 

 the locality and the condition oi the bone, but from the peculiar 

 way in which it had been cut and then broken it had all the 

 appearance of having been artificially worked, but he should 

 certainly only put it to a suspense account. With respect 

 to one observation of Prof. Dawkins, that the oldest implements 

 were ruder than the newer ones, he would remark that one 

 cause why the implements of Creswell Cave were so rude 

 was because they were made of quartzite, which could not be 

 finished in the same way as flint. At Amiens the older high-level 

 implements were often more finished and finer than those of the 

 low-level gravel. 



Col. Lane Fox wished to say a few words upon a point 

 not yet touched upon in any of the papers which had been 

 read, viz , the means by which valleys had been eroded, and 

 the time necessary to accomplish it. The uniformitarian 

 theory, by which it was assumed that al! the work of exca- 

 va'ing valleys had been performed by means of their rivers 

 flowing under the same conditions as at present, had been a 

 good deal modified of late years, and he thought he could add 

 a few facts from personal observation tending to show that some 

 modification of the theory was necessary. With respect to the 

 valley of the Somme, there was evidence afforded by relics of 

 the Roman and bronze age found in the peat in the bottom of 

 the valley, that the river had not materially lowered its bed since 

 those relics were deposited, and theref>re it must have taken an 

 enormous time to work out the whole valley by means of a river 

 which flowed with the same eroding power as at present. The 

 valley of the Somme, however, was so comparatively narrow 

 that It was possible the whole of it might have been eroded by 

 such means, if sufficient time were allowed. But if it could be 

 shown that the sam.e conditions prevailed in other very much 

 larger valleys where the work to be done was much greater, that 

 would afford fair presumptive evidence that the eroding force 

 must have been greater. He could mention oi:e or two facts 



which showed that the Thames like the Somme had never shifted 

 its bed since the bronze period. The first of these was that the 

 river some way below Oxford, at the village of Dorchester, made 

 a great bend ; the ground on one side was high, and on the 

 other, in the space inclosed by the bend perfectly, flat and low ; 

 there was an ancient intrenchment running across this low 

 ground from bank to bank, and converting the promontory 

 formed by the bend of the river into a fortress. It had been 

 ascertained by means of the relics, consisting of pottery, flints, 

 bronze implements, &c. , associated with this intrenchment, that 

 it was certainly as early as the bronze period, and perhaps 

 earlier, no relic of Roman work having been found there, 

 although Dorchester, close by, was a Roman station. The in- 

 trenchment in order to serve its purpose must have rested its 

 flanks on the river at the time it was made, and the fact of 

 their resting on the banks at the present time, although they 

 are only a foot or two in height, showed that the river had not 

 shifted or lowered its bed since the bronze age. Other evidence 

 giving the same results was found in the same river lower down. 

 Between Richmond and Battersea the Thames makes three or 

 four bends in the comparatively flat bottom of the valley which 

 is here more than four miles wide. He had found flint im- 

 plements of the drift type deposited in sedimentary sand and 

 gravel at Acton eighty feet above the present river, the dis- 

 covery of which was communicated by him to the Geological 

 Society and published in their journal. The river then since 

 these implements were deposited must not only have lowered 

 its bed eighty feet, but, according lo the uniformitarian theory, 

 must at each successive level have shifted its bed repeatedly so 

 as to work out the valley here more than four miles wide. Yet 

 bronze and stone implements have been found in considerable 

 numbers in all the various bends of the present river dredged 

 up from the gravel at the bottom by the dredging machines 

 that have been employed of late years, and proving that the 

 river had neither lowered nor shifted its bed since the bronze 

 period, but if anything it had risen since that time. Was it 

 possible, he would submit, that at this rate of progress, if pro- 

 gress it could be called, the erosion of the valley could be 

 attributed to the present river flowing under the same conditions 

 as at present ? But if, as believed by Prof. Boyd Dawkins and 

 Mr. Tiddeman, man existed in these parts during the subsidence 

 of the glacial epoch, that would account, he thought, for a much 

 greater flow of water having passed down these valleys in palaeo- 

 lithic times than was the case at present. In the valley of the 

 Solent the same class of evidence was obtained. Mr. Evans had 

 shown what a large amount of depression and erosion must have 

 taken place in this valley since drift implements were deposited 

 on the hill at Southampton. The valley of the Solent, from 

 Portsdown to the Isle of Wight, is nine miles wide, and we have 

 evidence in the Roman fortress at Porchester how little it has 

 changed in modern times ; yet in the centre of this valley near 

 Southsea common. Col. Fox had some years ago discovered 

 a flint station of the neolithic age, including celts, scrapers, and 

 flakes in great abundance, the site of which was less than ten feet 

 above the present high- water mark, showing that flint implements 

 continued to be fabricated in the valley after Imd and water had as- 

 samed its present distribution. All these facts, he thought, favoured 

 the opinion that powerful eroding forces must have been at work 

 before that time. The very valuable papers which had been 

 read treated only the geological aspects of the question, but as 

 the President had observed there were ethnological and socio- 

 logical problems to be solved, how long would it have required 

 for the various races of man to diverge, and the earliest traces of 

 culture to be evolved ? He trustel that even if no other result 

 came of the conference it would show that we had not yec 

 exhausted the subject. 



Prof. A. H. Sayce had to' confess that the evidence of 

 language as regarded the antiquity of mm was not so decisive 

 as tnat of geology. Under certain conditions the vocabulary 

 of a language changed rapidly, under other conditions it changed 

 slowly. The grammar of a language may be said to change 

 never, and its structure to change very rarely. If these con- 

 clusions were applied to two or three of the principil families 

 of speech, the results would be something like this : Take 

 the Semitic class of languages ; by means of the Assyrian 

 monuments we are able to get back to 2000 B.C. for a starting 

 point, when those languages were pretty much as they are to- 

 day. Scarcely any of the structure, or grammar, or vocabulary 

 has changed, but it is plain enough that they presupposed 

 several earlier stages of existence, and when compared with the 

 grammar of the old Egyptian there was a time when the parent 



