754 EVENING DISCOURSES, 
we live. He accepts the fossil man of Java—Pithvcanthropus, a being with a 
brain a little more than half the size of a modern man’s—as representative of 
mankind at the beginning of the Pleistocene; before the end of that period men 
of the modern type appeared. In Professor Boyd Dawkins’ opinion, then, man 
was evolved during the Pleistocene period and therefore, from a geologist’s 
point of view, is a recent addition to the earth’s fauna. If we ask how long ago 
it is since man appeared, Professor Boyd Dawkins replies: ‘It cannot be 
measured in years—only by the sequence of geological events, and by the changes 
in animal life.’ Yet we are certain that years came cycling round in the Pleisto- 
cene period just as they do now, and that every cycle wrought some degree of 
change on the face of the earth and on the form of living things—a degree of 
change which may be imperceptible in the period of a man’s life, and yet cumu- 
lative and apparent in the course of time. Men who have studied the transforma- 
tions effected during the Pleistocene period have formed varying estimates of 
its duration, but we may safely adopt as a moderate figure the 400,000 years given 
by Professor Sollas at a meeting of this Association in 1900. We may accept, 
then, as the orthodox opinion of to-day that the dawn of the very earliest form 
of humanity lies 400,000 years behind us; in that space of time man, as we know 
him now, was evolved from a crude, almost pre-human form. 
For a representative of modern heterodoxy—as far as relates to the antiquity 
of man—we cannot do better than visit the Royal Natural History Museum in 
Brussels and follow the guidance of M. Rutot, who has devoted himself to the 
study of the stone implements of ancient man and of recent geological forma- 
tions. One civilisation succeeded another in Pleistocene as in historical times. 
You will admit, when you examine the handiwork of the men of the Magdalenian 
age—at the close of the Pleistocene—that our ancestors were then artistic 
and skilled workmen. As we pass backwards in time from the Magdalenian to 
the Solutrean, and from the Solutrean to the Mousterian, Mousterian to Acheu- 
lean, and Acheulean to the Chellean—thus passing well beyond the mid-point of 
the Pleistocene—that although the handiwork of man changes in form and in 
design it does not lose in skill of execution; those flints of the remote Chellean 
period assure us that man had then a capable brain and a skilled hand. When, 
however, M. Rutot proceeds to show us the implements which were fashioned 
by men in the earlier parts of the Pleistocene, it is very probable that our ortho- 
dox companions will pull out their watches and find they have pressing engage- 
ments elsewhere. Human workmanship becomes cruder as we approach the 
commencement of the Pleistocene. The stones which have been wrought by 
man’s hand -(Eoliths) become then more difficult to distinguish from those which 
have been shaped by natural forces. M. Rutot, however, is convinced that he 
has traced man, by means of his eolithic culture, not only to the commencement 
of the Pleistocene, but into and through the two long geological periods which 
preceded the Pleistocene—the Pliocene and Miocene—and even well into the 
formations of the still older period, the Oligocene. In M. Rutot’s opinion the 
origin of mankind must be assigned to a time as early as the Oligocene period. 
Professor Sollas has made a provisional estimate of 900,000 years for the Pliocene, 
and 1,800,000 for the Miocene. On this crude estimate the heterodox opinion as 
to the antiquity of man must be placed at over 3,000,000 years. It is only just 
to M. Rutot to state that he would by no means agree to the estimates given by 
Professor Sollas. In his opinion the duration of the Pleistocene period was not 
more than 139,000_years. 
The modern heterodox movement, which I have sought to bring before you 
in the person of M. Rutot, had as its pioneer the late Professor Prestwich—a 
geologist whose long experience and great knowledge was tempered with a sound 
and conservative judgment. In 1859 he found flints on the uplands of Kent, 
between the Thames and the Weald, which he recognised as certainly the handi- 
work of man. Thousands of these eoliths have been collected by Mr. Benjamin 
Harrison. The deposits in which these eoliths are found were assigned by 
Professor Prestwich to a Pliocene date. Fifty years ago Sir Charles Lyell 
expressed the opinion that ‘sign’s of man’s existence’ would be found in the 
Cromer beds of East Anglia, which mark the commencement of the Pleistocene 
period in England. Eoliths have been found not only in the Cromer beds, but 
also in the Pliocene formations of that district—in the Norwich ‘crags by Mr. 
