TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ANTHROPOLOGY. 383 



in Hebrew or Greek is the remains of an older and reasonable phenomenon of 

 language ; but if so, this must have belonged to a period earlier than we can assign 

 to the theoretical parent language of either. Lastly, the development of civilisa- 

 tion requires a long period of pros-historic time. Experience and history show that 

 civilisation grew up gradually, while every age preserves recognisable traces of the 

 ages which went before. The woodman's axe of to-day still retains much of the 

 form of its ancestor — the stone celt in its wooden handle ; the mathematician's tables 

 keep up in their decimal notation a record of the early ages when man's ten fingers 

 first taught him to count ; the very letters with which I wrote these lines may be 

 followed back to the figures of birds and beasts and other objects drawn by the 

 ancient Egyptians, at first as mere picture writing to denote the things represented. 

 Yet, when we learn from the monuments what ancient Egyptian life was like 

 towards 5,000 years ago, it appears that civilisation had already come on so far 

 that there was an elaborate system of government, an educated literary priesthood, 

 a nation skilled in agriculture, architecture, and metal work. These ancient Egyp- 

 tians, far from being near the beginning of civilisation, had, as the late Baron Bunsen 

 held, already reached its halfway house. This eminent Egyptologist's moderate 

 estimate of man's age on the earth at about 20,000 years has the merit of having 

 been made on historical grounds alone, independently of geological evidence, for the 

 proofs of the existence of man in the quaternary or mammoth period had not yet 

 gained acceptance. 



My purpose in briefly stating here the evidence of man's antiquity derived from 

 race, language, and culture is to insist that these arguments stand on their own 

 ground. It is true that the geological argument from the implements in the drift- 

 gravels and bone-caves, by leading to a general belief that man is extremely ancient 

 on the earth, has now made it easier to anthropologists to maintain a rationally 

 satisfactory theory of the race-types and mental development of mankind. But we 

 should by no means give up this vantage ground, though the ladder we climbed 

 by should break down. Even if it could be proved that the flint implements of 

 Abbeville or Torquay were really not so ancient as the pyramids of Egypt, this 

 would not prevent us from still assuming, for other and sufficient reasons, a period 

 of human life on earth extending many thousand years farther back. 



It is an advantage of this state of the evidence that it to some extent gets rid 

 of the ' sensational ' element in the problem of fossil man, which it leaves as 

 merely an interesting inquiry into the earliest known relics of savage tribes. 

 Geological criticism has not yet absolutely settled either way the claims of the 

 Abbe" Bourgeois' flints from Thenay to be of Miocene date, or of Mr. Skertchly's 

 from Brandon to be Glacial. The accepted point is that the men who made the 

 ordinary flint implements of the drift lived in the quaternary period characterised 

 by the presence of the mammoth in our part of Europe. More than one geologist, 

 however, has lately maintained that this quaternary period was not of extreme 

 antiquity. The problem is at what distance from the present time the drift-gravels 

 on the valley slopes can have been deposited by water action up to one hundred feet 

 or so above the present flood-levels. It does not seem the prevailing view among 

 geologists that rivers on the same small scale as those at present occupying mere 

 ditches in the wide valley-floors could have left these deposits on the hill" sides at a 

 time when they had not yet scooped out the valleys to within fifty or a hundred 

 feet of their present depth. Indeed, such means are insufficient out of all propor- 

 tion to the results, as a mere look down from the hill-tops into such valleys is 

 enough to show. Geologists connect the deposit of the high drift-gravels with the 

 subsidence and elevation of the land, and the powerful action of ice and water at 

 the close of the Glacial age ; and the term ' Pluvial period ' is often used to charac- 

 terise this time of heavy rainfall and huge rivers. It was then that the rude stone 

 implements of palaeolithic man were imbedded in the drift-gravels with the 

 remains of the mammoth and fossil rhinoceros, and we have to ask what events 

 have taken place in these regions since P The earth's surface has been altered to 

 bring the land and water to their present levels, the huge animals became extinct, 

 the country was inhabited by the tribes whose relics belong to the neolithic or 

 polished-stone age, and afterwards the metal-using Keltic nations possessed the 

 land, their arrival being fixed as previous to 400 B.C., the king of the Gauls then 



