96 Correspondence — Marie C. C Slopes. 



no one would ancept the idea that man was living at so early a date, 

 and the important discovery was practically ridiculed. In 18S7' 

 Henry Stopes wrote in the preface to a printed lecture, " I have 

 aiforded the scientific world matter for laughter for some years. 

 My turn to laugh is suiely and rapidly coming, for man will most 

 certainly be proved to he as old as the Crag." 



Owing to his early death he published little of the great works 

 he planned, and the remarkable nature of his divinations and his 

 laborious amassing of facts have never been fully recognized ; but in 

 this i»resent year, when his prediction regarding the contemporaneous 

 existence of man and the lied Crag fossils is establislied b}' others, 

 it is worth recalling the facts about the fossil-portrait — the oldest 

 work of art in the country. 



The engraved sliell is a specimen of Pectunculus glycimeru, a very 

 common species in the Crag. It is natuially bored near the hinge 

 by a small circular hole, which may have given its initial value to 

 the first maker uf miniatures. The shell's concave surface has five 

 deep-cut marks, viz., two eyes, circular; a large nose, triangular; 

 a wide mouth, slightly curved, with below it a small, nearly straight 

 mark for a lower lip or chin. The portrait of humanity, though 

 crude, is unmistakable. 



The following points should be noticed. The rough surface of these 

 incisions is of exactly the same colour as is the rest of the shell — 

 a bright red-brown ; while a fossil surface of this colour cut into 

 to-day is white. Furthermore, this colour is as firmly established as 

 the rest of the shell colour. My father submitted it freely to test, 

 and allowed Mr. E. T. Newton to test it exhaustively. Mr. Newton 

 said in 1897 in his presidential address to the Geologists' Association 

 (p. 75), " The colour of the engrave! portions is as firm as that of the 

 rest of the shell." * He hesitated, however, to accept the shell as proof 

 of the existence of man in Red Crag times. ^ 



Now, however, that implements have been found, and Mr. Stopes' 

 prophecy come to pass, the shell should be accorded its proper place 

 among woiks of Palaeolithic art. It is the first recorded Palaeolithic 

 drawing, for though the Times in 1885 gave credit to a Frenchman 

 for the fir.<5t discovery of such early traces of man, Mr. Stopes had 

 read his paper before the British Association in 1881. 



Marie C. C. Stopes, D.Sc. (Lond.), F.L.S. 

 14 Well Walk, Hampstead Heath, N.W. 



^ H. Stopes, "On the Antiquity of Man " : paper to the Dulwich Eclectic 

 Club, 1887. 



^ E. T. Newton, " The Evidence for the Existence of Man in the Tertiary 

 Period " : Pres. Add. Geol. Assoc, 1897. 



^ [Mr. E. T. Newton, after dealing rery fully with the evidence, said in con- 

 clusion, " I am afraid there is too much doubt hanging over this carved Crag 

 shell to allow us to accept it as definite evidence of Tertiary Man." — Presidential 

 Address to the Geologists' Association delivered February 5, 1897 : Proc. Geol. 

 Assoc, vol. XV, 1897-8 (1899), p. 76.— Ed. Geol. Mag.] 



