Sept. 28, 1882] 



NATURE 



533 



in the instruments of the Surface Stone Period it is nearly 

 always the broad end that is sharpened, and this has often been 

 effected by grinding or polishing the edges, while in the imple- 

 ments of the period we are now considering the edges are never 

 ground. The name by which this period is generally known is 

 the Falseolitbic or Ancient Stone Period, though it is sometimes 

 also termed the River-drift Period, as the implements belonging 

 to it are usually found in river-drift. Of the other appliances in 

 use among those who made the large palreolith'c implements we 

 can best judge by the remains which have been found beneath 

 the floors of some of the caverns both of England and France, 

 which, however, for the most part probably belong to a some- 

 what more recent date. In the days when those caverns w ere 

 occupied as dwellings the reindeer still formed a principal article 

 of food in the South of France. Those who hunted it were 

 sufficiently good artists to carve figures of it in bone, or to 

 engrave them on slabs of slate. Some representations of the 

 elephant have also been found. They carved harpoons in rein- 

 deer horn, prepared skins with stone scrapers, and sewed them 

 together by means of bone needles, probably using reindeer 

 tendons as thread. The men, however, who were in this state 

 of civilisation lived at a time when the valleys had been 

 excavated to nearly their present depth, Yet even between 

 them and the people of the Neolithic or Surface Stone Period 

 there appears to be a great gulf — a chapter of unwritten history, 

 which at present we have no means of reading. 



Let us now return to the river-drift, and see what more it can 

 teach us. I have told you how on the high ground where now 

 is Southampton Common there are beds of gravel containing 

 water-worn flint implements, and that these beds must in all pro- 

 bability have been deposited in the bottom of a river valley. 

 Farther south we find gravels of a similar character, but at 

 lower levels, forming cliffs of no great height along the sea-shore 

 from Hambley to Alverstoke. These cliffs arc now being eaten 

 away by the action of the sea, and among the pebbles spread by 

 the waves upon the shore numerous well- wrought implements 

 have been found, while farther east, at Selsey, there are extensive 

 drift-beds containing remains of the mammoth. Nor are traces 

 of the river, which ueposited these beds, wanting on the other 

 side of Spithead, for in the shingle at Bembridge implements of 

 the same kind have been discovered, and Mr. Codrington found 

 a good specimen, some 80 feet above the present sea-level, in 

 gravel on the Foreland at the east end of the I>le of Wight. 



It will probably be some little strain upon your powers of 

 imagination for you mentally to fill up the great channel of the 

 sea which we know as Southampton Water, and which now 

 forms the basis of the prosperity of this town, and to picture 

 to yourselves a river flowing in the same direction, spreading 

 out gravels along its changing course at a height considerably 

 above the present sea-level, and yet having its shores frequented 

 by that early race of men who fa-hioned the implement^ which 

 we find in the gravels. But I shall have to make a still further 

 demand upon your powers of belief. 



I have already spoken to you about the drift-deposits along 

 the valley of the Avon, but I mu t now take you a little farther 

 west, and call your attention to discoveries which have been 

 i.iade at Bournemouth. There, as many of you no doubt 

 remember, the cliffs are fcrmed of beds of sand and clay belong- 

 ing to a period a little older, geologically speaking, than the 

 Bracklesharn beds whch form the subsoil of Southampton. 

 These cliffs are, however, capped with gravel ; and in this, also, 

 at a height of more than 120 feet above the sea-level, implements 

 have been found. Farther -east, near Boscombe, the height of 

 the gravel is still about 120 feet ; at Ilengistbury Head it is 00 

 feet ; and at Barton and Hordle, where numerous implements 

 have been found, it is 60 or 70 feet. There can, indeed, be but 

 little doubt that these gravels which now cap the cliffs must 

 originally have been deposited in the bed of a river, and that 

 that river flowed in an easterly direction. But how, it will be 

 asked, can any river have possibly taken such a course ? I will 

 ask you, in return, Of what are the Needles at Alum Bay the 

 relics ? Are they not the shattered and sea worn remains of an 

 extension of the great chalk ridge of High Down westward from 

 Freshwater? Can you not imagine them still forming part of 

 the down, with other Needles, which have now disappeared, 

 towering still farther to the west ? Can you not picture to your- 

 selves the foreland of Ballard Down, on the Dorset coast, and 

 its accompanying pinnacles standing out still farther to the east, 

 and thus in your mind's eye gradually bridge over the gap of 

 fifteen miles, which now exists between the chalk downs of 



Dorset and those of the Isle of Wight ? There mu>t almost of 

 necessity have been a period when these two ranges of downs 

 formed one continuous ridge, and wh n, in fact, the Isle of 

 Wight was not separated from England by any arm of the sea. 

 At that time the rivers which now discharge their waters at 

 Poole, at Christchurch, at Lymington, and at Exbury, must all 

 have been contributed to form a river the course of which must 

 have been from west to east, in a direction nearly parallel to 

 the chalk downs. Of the bed of this river we have traces in 

 the gravels which now cap the cliffs of our southern coast. The 

 history of the disappearance of this ancient river appears sus- 

 ceptible of being traced. We know not how far the land may 

 have extended to the south of the chalk downs at the time when 

 it first began to flow ; but in the course of long ages the never- 

 ceasing wear of the sea.slow but sure in its action, must have 

 effected a breach through the line of chalk downs, and have 

 then more rapidly cut aw ay some of the softer beds to the north, 

 so as to afford a new means of access by which the waters of 

 the river would find a way to the sea. As itime went on this 

 breach would become wider and wider, until, as we see at pre- 

 sent the whole of the southern slope of the old river valley dis- 

 appeared for a distance of fifteen miles between Ballard Down 

 and the Needles ; while that part of the bed of the old river 

 which still had land to the south was widened out until it became 

 the Solent Sea and Spithead, which now separates the Isle of 

 Wight from the mainland. 



I might have given you evidence from which it has been con- 

 cluded that, at the period when the river gravels containing flint 

 implements were deposited, England was still united to the 

 Continent, and the Straits of Dover did not exist. I might 

 have pointed out the existence of similar implements discovered 

 under nearly similar circumstances in remote quarters of the 

 world. But time will not suffice, and you must be content with 

 my attempt to read this chapter of local history. I must, how- 

 ever, warn you against supposing that, old as may lie these relics 

 they repre-ent the fir-t advent of man upon the earth. On the 

 contrary, their similarity in so many regions points to some early 

 home of the human family from which the makers of these flint 

 tools in different countries originally migrated. Of this home, 

 however, as yet no traces have been found. As to the number 

 of years embraced in this chapter of the river-drift it is hard 

 even to speculate. It can only be judged by the changes which 

 have since taken place. We have seen how in the Roman times 

 this part of Britain was, so far as the distribution of land and 

 water is concerned, much the same as at present, and that there 

 can have been but little difference in the days when bronze was 

 in use for cutting-tools or in that lengenthened period w hen stone 

 did duty for steel. Hut when we come to this earlier chapter in 

 our history, all is charged. We find on the top of our hills and 

 the capping of our cliffs gravels which must have been deposited 

 at the bottom of rivers, but which testify to the exi-tence of man 

 at the time of their deposit. We find a total change in the 

 animal world of the region ; we find that deep volleys have been 

 excavated and river-courses widened out into arm^ of the sea, 

 and 'the whole shape and form of the country changed. No 

 wonder if, with so wide a room for speculation, different observers 

 adopt somewhat different readings of this chapter of unwritten 

 history. I have given you my reading of it, in which I see the 

 antiquity of man carried back so far into the dim past, that even 

 Egyptian chronology, extending as it does over thousands ot 

 years, appears but to cover a small link in the long chain of 

 human existence— a chain of which the first link has still to be 

 discovered. If you on your part will attempt to check and 

 verify my reading, and study attentively what is still going on 

 under your eyes, it will bring home to you the mighty effects 

 which may arise from the small but ever-active agents, rains and 

 rivers tide and time ; and whether in the end you agree with 

 my reading or not, you will find that you have added a new 

 interest to your lives. 



PROFESSOR HAECKEL ON DARWIN, 

 GOETHE, AND LAMARCK 1 



WHEN five months ago the sad intelligence reached us 1 ry 

 telegraph from England, that on April 19 Charles Darwin 

 had concluded his life of rich activity, there thrilled with rare 

 unanimity through the whole scientific world the feeling of an 

 irreparable loss. Not only did the innumerable adherents and 

 1 Lecture given at the Eisenach meeting of the German Naturalists and 

 Physicians. 



