10 REPORT— 1897. 



are persuaded that we ought to make more liberal grants of time to the 

 Geologist, we feel how hard it is to get the chill of poverty out of our 

 bones.' 



Many, however, have at the present day got over this feeling, and of 

 late years the general tendency of those engaged upon the question of the 

 antiquity of the human race has been in the direction of seeking for 

 evidence by which the existence of Man upon the earth could be carried 

 back to a date earlier than that of the Quaternary gravels. 



There is little doubt that such evidence will eventually be forthcoming, 

 but, judging from all probability, it is not in Northern Europe that the 

 cradle of the human race will eventually be discovered, but in some part 

 of the world more favoured by a tropical climate, where abundant means 

 of subsistence could be procured, and where the necessity for warm 

 clothing did not exist. 



Before entering into speculations on this subject, or attempting to lay 

 down the limits within which we may safely accept recent discoveries as 

 firmly established, it will be well to glance at some of the cases in which 

 implements are stated to have been found under circumstances which 

 raise a presumption of the existence of man in pre-Glacial, Pliocene, or 

 even Miocene times. 



Flint implements of ordinary Palaeolithic type have, for instance, been 

 recorded as found in the Eastern Counties of England, in beds beneath 

 the Chalky Boulder Clay ; but on careful examination the geological 

 evidence has not to my mind proved satisfactory, nor has it, I believe, 

 been generally accepted. Moreover, the archaeological difficulty that Man, 

 at two such I'emote epochs as the pre-Glacial and the post-Glacial, even if 

 the term Glacial be limited to the Chalky Boulder Clay, should have 

 manufactured implements so identical in character that they cannot be 

 distinguished apart, seems to have been entirely ignored. 



Within the last few months we have had the report of worked flints 

 having been discovered in the late Pliocene Forest Bed of Norfolk, but in 

 that instance the signs of human workmanship upon the flints are by no 

 means apparent to all observers. 



But such an antiquity as that of the Forest Bed is as nothing when 

 compared with that which would be implied by the discoveries of the 

 work of men's hands in the Pliocene and Miocene beds of England, 

 France, Italy, and Portugal, which have been accepted by some 

 Geologists. There is one feature in these cases which has hardly received 

 due attention, and that is the isolated character of the reputed discoveries. 

 Had man, for instance, been present in Britain during the Crag Period, 

 it would be strange indeed if the sole traces of bis existence that he left 

 were a perforated tooth of a large shark, the sawn rib of a manatee, and 

 a beaming full face, carved on the shell of a pectunculus ! 



In an address to the Anthropological Section at the Leeds meeting of 

 this Association in 1890 I dealt somewhat fully with these supposed 



