384 eepoet — 1879. 



being called by the Romans by the name Brennus, which is simply the Keltic 

 word for ' kin 0, ' — in modern Welsh brenin. To take in this succession of events 

 geologists and archaeologists generally hold that a long period is required. Yet 

 there are some few who find room for them all in a comparatively short period. 

 I will mention Principal Dawson, of Montreal, well known as a geologist in this 

 Association, and who has shown his conviction of the soundness of his views by 

 adressing them to the general public in a little volume entitled ' The Story of the 

 Earth and Man.' Having examined the gravels of St.-Acheul, on the Somme, 

 where M. Boucher de Perthes found his celebrated drift implements, it appeared 

 to Dr. Dawson that, taking into account the probabilities of a different level of 

 the land, a wooded condition of the country and greater rainfall, and a glacial 

 filling up of the Somme valley with clay and stones subsequently cut out by 

 running water, the gravels could scarcely be older than the Abbeville peat, and 

 the age of this peat he estimates as perhaps less than four thousand years. Within 

 this period Dr. Dawson includes a comparatively rapid subsidence of the land, 

 with a partial re-elevation, which left large areas of the lower grounds beneath 

 the sea. This he describes as the geological deluge which separates the post-glacial 

 period from the modern, and the earlier from the later prehistoric period of the 

 archaeologists. 



My reason for going here into these computations of Dr. Dawson's is that the 

 date about 2200 B.C., to which he thus assigns these great geological convulsions, 

 is actually within historic times. In Egypt successive dynasties had been reigning 

 for ages, and the pyramids had long been built ; while in Babylonia the old 

 Chaldrean kings had been raising the temples whose ruins still remain. That is to 

 say, we are asked to receive, as matter of geology, that stupendous geological 

 changes were going on not far from the Mediterranean, including a final plunge of 

 I know not how much of the earth's surface beneath the waters, and yet national 

 life on the banks of the Nile and the Euphrates went on unbroken and apparently 

 undisturbed through it all. To us in this Section it is instructive to see how the 

 free use of paroxysms and cataclysms makes it possible to shorten up geological 

 time. Accustomed as we are to geology demanding periods of time which often 

 seem to history exorbitant, the tables are now turned, and we are presented with 

 the unusual spectacle of chronology protesting against geology for encroaching on 

 the historical period. 



In connection with the question of quaternary man, it is worth while to notice 

 that the use of the terms ' primaeval ' or ' primitive ' man, with reference to the 

 savages of the mammoth period, seems sometimes to lead to unsound inferences. 

 There appears no particular reason to think that the relics from the drift-beds or 

 hone-caves represent man as he first appeared on the earth. The contents of the 

 caves especially bear witness to a state of savage art, in some respects fairly high, 

 and which may possibly have somewhat fallen off from an ancestral state in a more 

 favourable climate. Indeed, the savage condition generally, though rudeand more 

 or less representing early stages of culture, never looks absolutely primitive, just 

 as no savage language ever has the appearance of being a primitive language. 

 What the appearance and state of our really primaeval ancestors may have been 

 seems too speculative a question, until there shall be more signs of agreement 

 between the anthropologists, who work back by comparison of actual races of man 

 toward a hypothetical common stock, and the zoologists, who approach the problem 

 through the species adjoining the human. There is, however, a point relating to 

 the problem to which attention is due. Naturalists not unreasonably claim to find 

 the geographical centre of man in the tropical regions of the old world inhabited 

 by his nearest zoological allies, the anthropomorphous apes, and there is at any 

 rate force enough in such a view to make careful quest of human remains worth 

 while in those districts, from Africa across to the Eastern Archipelago. Under the 

 care of Mr. John Evans a fund has been raised for excavations in the caves of 

 Borneo by Mr. Everett, and though the search has as yet had no striking result, 

 money is well spent in carrying on such investigations in likely equatorial forest 

 regions. It would be a pity that for want of enterprise a chance, however slight, 

 should be missed of settling a question so vital to anthropology. 



While the problem of primitive man thus remains obscure, a somewhat more 



