ADDRESS. 17 



of the relics of their industry have been assigned to a date some 3,500 to 

 4,000 years before our era. The men of that time had attained to the 

 liighest degree of skill in working flint that has ever been reached. 

 Their beautifully made knives and spear-heads seem indicative of a culmi- 

 nating point reached after long ages of experience ; but whence these 

 artists in flint came or who they were is at present absolutely unknown, 

 and their handiworks afford no clue to help us in tracing their origin. 



Taking a wider survey, we may say that, generally speaking, not only 

 the fauna but the surface configuration of the country were, in Western 

 Europe at all events, much the same at the commencement of the Neolithic 

 Period as they are at the present day. We have, too, no geological indi- 

 cations to aid us in forming any chronological scale. 



The occupation of some of the caves in the south of France seems to 

 have been cari'ied on after the erosion of the neighbouring river valleys 

 had ceased, and so far as our knowledge goes these caves offer evidence of 

 being the latest in time of those occupied by Man during the Palaeolithic 

 Period. It seems barely possible that, though in the north of Europe 

 there are no distinct signs of such late occupation, yet that, in the south, 

 Man may have lived on, though in diminished numbers ; and that in some 

 of the caves, such, for instance, as those in the neighbourhood of Mentone, 

 there may be traces of his existence during the transitional period that 

 connects the Paleolithic and Neolithic Ages. If this were really the case, 

 we might expect to find some traces of a dissemination of Neolithic culture 

 from a North Italian centre, but I much doubt whether any such traces 

 actually exist. 



If it had been in that part of the world that the transition took 

 place, how are we to account for the abundance of polished stone hatchets 

 found in Central India ? Did Neolithic man return eastward by the 

 same route as that by which in remote ages his Palseolithic predecessor 

 had migrated westward ? Would it not be in defiance of all probability 

 to answer such a question in the aflarmative 1 We have, it must be 

 confessed, nothing of a substantial character to guide us in these specula- 

 tions ; but, pending the advent of evidence to the contrary, we may, I 

 think, provisionally adopt the view that owing to failure of food, climatal 

 changes, or other causes, the occupation of Western Europe by Palseolithic 

 man absolutely ceased, and that it was not until after an interval of long 

 duration that Europe was re-peopled by a race of men immigrating from 

 some other part of the globe where the human race had survived, and in 

 course of ages had developed a higher stage of culture than that of 

 Palseolithic man. 



I have been carried away by the liberty allowed for conjecture into 

 the regions of pure imagination, and must now return to the realms of 

 fact, and one fact on which I desire for a short time to insist is that 

 of the existence at the present day, in close juxtaposition with our own 

 civilisation, of races of men who, at all events but a few generations ago, 



1897. c 



