TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 965 
sumed discovery of parts of the human skeleton; (2) that of animal bones said to 
have been cut and worked by the hand of man ; and (8) that of flints thought to 
be artificially fashioned. 
On most of these I have already commented elsewhere:! Under the first head 
I may mention the skull discovered by Professor Cocchi at Olmo, near Arezzo, 
with which, however, distinctly Neolithic implements were associated; the 
skeletons found at Castelnedolo—of which I need only say that M. Sergi, who 
described the discovery, regarded them as the remains of a family party who had 
suffered shipwreck in Pliocene times; and the fossil man of Denise, in the 
Auvergne, mentioned by Sir Charles Lyell, who may have been buried in more 
recent times under lava of Pliocene date. On these discoveries no superstructure 
can be built. The Calaveras skull seeras to have better claims to a high antiquity. 
It is said to have been found at a depth of 153 feet in the auriferous gravels of 
California, containing remains of mastodon, and covered by five or six beds of lava 
or volcanic ashes. But here again doubts enter into the case, as well-fashioned 
mortars, stone hatchets, and even pottery, are said to occur in the same deposits. 
In the same way the discoveries of M. Ameghino at the mouth of the Plata, in the 
Argentine Republic, require much further corroboration. 
The presumably worked bones which I have placed in the second category, 
such as those with incisions in them from St. Prest, near Chartres, the cut bones of 
cetacea in Tuscany, the fractured bones in our own crag-deposits, and numerous 
other specimens of a similar character, have, by most geologists, been regarded as 
bearing marks entirely due to natural agencies. It seems more probable that in 
bones deposited at the bottom of Pliocene seas, cuts and marks should have been 
produced by the teeth of carnivorous fish, than by men who could only have lived 
on the shores of the seas, and who have left behind them no instruments by which 
such cuts as those on the bones could have been produced. 
As to the third category, the instruments of flint reported to have been found 
in Tertiary deposits, those best known are from St. Prest and Thenay, in the 
North-West of France, and Otta, in Portugal. 
These three localities I have visited ; and though at the two former the beds in 
which the flints were said to have been found are certainly Pliocene, there is con- 
siderable doubt in some cases whether the flints have been fasliioned at all, and in 
others, where they appear to have been wrought, whether they belong to the beds 
in which they are reported to have been found, and have not come from the surface 
of the ground. Even the suggestion that the flints of Thenay were fashioned by 
the dryopithecus, one of the precursors of man, has now been retracted. At Otta 
the flakes that have been found present, as a rule, only a single bulb of percussion, 
and, having been found on the surface, their evidence is of small value. The exaet 
geological age of the beds on which they have occurred is, moreover, somewhat 
doubtful. On the whole, therefore, it appears to me that the present verdict as 
to Tertiary man must be in the form of ‘ Not proven.’ 
When we consider the vast amount of time comprised in the Tertiary Period, 
with its three great principal subdivisions of the Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, 
and when we bear in mind that of the vertebrate land animals of the Eocene no one 
has survived to the present time, while of the Pliocene but one—the hippopotamus 
—remains unmodified, the chances that man, as at present constituted, should also 
be a survivor from that period seem remote, and against the species Homo sapiens 
having existed in Miocene times almost incalculable. The @ priori improbability 
of finding man unchanged, while all the other vertebrate animals around him 
have, from natural causes, undergone more or less extensive modification, will 
induce all careful investigators to look closely at any evidence that would carry 
him back beyond Quaternary times; and though it would be unsafe to deny the 
possibility of such an early origin for the human race, it would be unwise to regard 
it as established except on the clearest evidence. 
Another question of more general interest than that of the existence of Tertiary 
1 Trans. Herts. Nat. Hist. Soc. vol. i. p. 145; ‘Address to the Anthrop. Inst. 
1883’; Axnth. Jowrn. vol. xii, p. 565. 
