12 EEPORT— 1897. 



Tl\e examination of British cave-deposits affords corroborative evi- 

 dence of this extended duration of the Palaeolithic Period. In Kent's 

 Cavern at Torquay, for instance, we find in the lowest deposit, the breccia 

 below the red cave-earth, implements of flint and chert corresponding in 

 all respects with those of the high level and most ancient river gravels. 

 In the cave-earth these are scarcer, though implements occur which also 

 have their analogues in the river deposits ; but, what is more remarkable, 

 harpoons of reindeer's horn and needles of bone are present, identical in 

 form and character with those of the caverns of the Reindeer Period in 

 the South of France, and suggestive of some bond of union or identity of 

 descent between the early troglodytes, whose habitations were geographi- 

 cally so widely separated the one from tlie other. 



In a cavern at Creswell Crags, on the confines of Derbyshire and 

 Nottinghamshire, a bone has moreover been found engraved with a repre- 

 sentation of parts of a horse in precisely the same style as the engraved 

 bones of the French caves. 



It is uncertain whether any of the River-drift specimens belong to so 

 late a date as these artistic cavern-remains ; but the greatly superior 

 antiquity of even these to any Neolithic relics is testified by the thick 

 layer of stalagmite, which had been deposited in Kent's Cavern before its 

 occupation by men of the Neolithic and Bronze Periods. 



Towards the close of the period covered by the human occupation of 

 the French caves, there seems to have been a dwindling in the number of 

 the larger animals constituting the Quaternary fauna, whereas their re- 

 mains are present in abundance in the lower and therefore more recent of 

 the valley gravels. This circumstance may afibrd an argument in favour 

 of regarding the period represented by the later French caves as a con- 

 tinuation of that during which the old river gravels were deposited, and 

 yet the great change in the fauna that has taken place since the latest of 

 the cave-deposits included in the Paleolithic Period is indicative of an 

 immense lapse of time. 



How much greater must have been the time required for the more 

 conspicuous change between the old Quaternary fauna of the river gravels 

 and that characteristic of the Neolithic Period ! 



As has been pointed out by Pi-of. Boyd Dawkins, only thirty-one out 

 of the forty-eight well- ascertained species living in the post-Glacial or 

 River-drift Period survived into pre-historic or Neolithic times. We 

 have not, indeed, any means at command for estimating the number of 

 centuries which such an important change indicates ; but when we 

 remember that the date of the commencement of the Neolithic or Surface 

 Stone Period is still shrouded in the mist of a dim antiquity, and that 

 prior to that commencement the River-drift Period had long come to an 

 end ; and when we further take into account the almost inconceivable 

 ages that even under the most favourable conditions the excavation of 

 wide and deep valleys by river action implies, the remoteness of the date 



