Notes and Comments. 265 



lithic Man, in confirmation of which a flint scraper had been 

 picked up ' on the site.' The Naturalist, from time to time 

 in recent years has drawn attention to the unreliable nature 

 of reports dealing with natural history, geology and arch- 

 aeology, and has protested. In some cases the papers are of 

 such a character that unreliable records may be expected 

 from them, but in the case of The Yorkshire Post, matters are 

 different, and its usually reliable records have given us con- 

 fidence with regard to any new discoveries it announces. For 

 this reason it is all the more surprising to find that the following 

 letter which had been sent to them by ' Antiquary ' has not 

 been considered suitable for publication in the Journal. 

 ' Antiquary ' tells us that the Editor has written to him in 

 connection with the letter, but the fact that no correction 

 of the alleged extraordinary discovery, as reported, has 

 appeared, is hardly what we should have expected from The 

 Yorkshire Post. 



NEOLITHIC MAN IX YORKSHIRE. 



'Referring to the lengthy report of the Grassington "dis- 

 covery ' ' in your issue of this morning : would it not be 

 better if, before reports of this character were published, 

 . some competent authority was consulted. In the present case 

 there is not a scrap of evidence that the skeleton found is 

 Neolithic, and the probability is the skeleton is very much 

 more recent in date. The fact that a flint ' scraper,' whatever 

 that may be, was found on the site, is nothing to go by. As 

 a matter of fact. Neolithic or New Stone Age Burials are 

 exceedingly rare. Mortimer, who opened considerably over 

 300 pre-historic graves did not, so far as I remember, find 

 a single Neolithic Burial ; they were all of the Bronze Age 

 and later. I doubt very much whether an authentic Neolithic 

 Burial has occurred in Yorkshire, though at the moment I 

 am writing from memory. It would be interesting to know 

 what the "certain facts" are which point distinctly to the 

 Neolithic date of the recent find. Yours etc., "Antiquary." ' 



A ROEBUCK MEMORIAL. 



The current number of The Journal of Concho logy (Vol. 

 XVI., No. 6) is a " Roebuck Memorial Number," and is 

 occupied with an account of the distribution of land and fresh- 

 water mollusca in the British Isles, based on the 59,000 

 authenticated records collected by the late Denison Roebuck 

 from 1877 till his death in 1919. The facts are given in 

 tables under 153 topographical divisions, and are also shown in 

 more than 150 small maps, and should be of great interest to 

 students of geographical distribution as well as to concholo- 

 gists. It is to be hoped that the publication will stimulate 

 naturalists to deal with other groups in the same way, and so 



1921 Aug. 1 



