900 KEPORT — 1884. 



leaving tlie detailed treatment of the topics raised to come in the more specialised 

 papers and discussions which form the cm-rent business of the Section. 



The term prehistoric, invaluable to anthropologists since Professor Daniel 

 Wilson introduced it more than thirty years ago, stretches back from times just 

 outside the range of written history into the remotest ages where human remains 

 or relics, or other more indirect evidence, justifies the opinion that man existed. 

 Far back in these prehistoric periods, the problem of Quaternary man turns on the 

 presence of his rude stone implements in the drift gravels and in caves, associated 

 with the remains of what may be called for shortness the mammoth-fauna. Not to 

 recapitulate details which have been set down in a hundred books, the point 

 to be insisted on is how, in the experience of those who, like myself, have 

 followed them since the time of Boucher de Perthes, the effect of a quarter of 

 a century's research and criticism has been to give Quaternary man a more and 

 more real position. The clumsy flint pick and its contemporary mammoth-tooth 

 have become stock articles in museums, and every year adds new localities where 

 palaeolithic implements are found of the types catalogued years ago by Evans, and 

 in beds agreeing with the sections drawn years ago by Prestwich. It is generally 

 admitted that about the close of the Glacial period savage man killed the huge 

 maned elephants, or fled from the great lions and tigers on what was then forest- 

 clad valley-bottom, in ages before the later waterflow had cut out the present wide 

 valleys 50 or 100 feet or more lower, leaving the remains of the ancient drift-beds 

 exposed high on what are now the slopes. To fix our ideas on the picture of an 

 actual locality, we may fancy ourselves standing with Mr. Spurrell on the old sandy 

 beach of the Thames near Crayford, 35 feet above where the river now flows two 

 miles away in the valley. Here we are on the very workshop-floor where palaeo- 

 lithic man sat chipping at the blocks of flint which had fallen out of the chalk cliff 

 above his head. There lie the broken remains of his blocks, the flint chips he 

 knocked off, and which can be fitted back into their places, the striking-stones with 

 which the flaking was done ; and with these the splintered bones of mammoth and 

 tichorhine rhinoceros, possibly remains of meals. Moreover, as if to point the con- 

 trast between the rude palaeolithic man who worked these coarse blocks, and 

 apparently never troubled himself to seek for better material, the modern visitor 

 sees within 50 yards of the spot the bottle-shaped pits dug out in later ages by 

 neolithic man through the soil to a depth in the chalk where a layer of good 

 workable flint supplied him with the material for his neat flakes and trimly-chipped 

 arrow-heads. The evidence of caverns such as those of Devonshire and Perigord,. 

 with their revelations of early European life and art, has been supplemented by 

 many new explorations, without shaking the conclusion arrived at as to the age 

 known as the reindeer period of the northern half of Europe, when the mammoth 

 and cave-bear and their contemporary mammals had not yet disappeared, but the 

 close of the Glacial period was merging into the times when in England and France 

 savages hunted the reindeer for food as the Arctic tribes of America do still. 

 Human remains of these early periods are still scarce and unsatisfactory for deter- 

 mining race-types. Among "the latest finds is part of a skull from the loess, at 

 Podbaba, near Prague, with prominent brow-ridges, though less remarkable in this 

 way than the celebrated Neanderthal skull. It remains the prevailing opinion of 

 anatomists that these very ancient skulls are not apt to show extreme lowness of type, 

 but to be higher in the scale than, for instance, the Tasmanian. The evidence increases 

 as to the wide range of palaeolithic man. He extended far into Asia, where his 

 characteristic rude stone implements are plentifully found in the caves of Syria and 

 the foot-hills of Madras. The question which this Section may have especial 

 means of dealing with is whether man likewise inhabited America with the great 

 extinct animals of the Quaternary period, if not even earlier. 



Among the statements brought forward as to this subject, a few are mere 

 fictions, while others, though entirely genuine, are surrounded with doubts, making 

 it difficult to use them for anthropological purposes. We shall not discuss the 

 sandalled human giants, whose footprints, U0 inches long, are declared to have 

 been found with the foot-prints of mammoths, among whom they walked, at 

 Carson, Nevada. There is something picturesque in the idea of a man in a past 



