Prof. J. Phillips’s Inaugural Address. 459 
settlements in Gaul. The people of whom these are the traces on 
almost every lake in Switzerland are recognized as well in the 
ancient lake-basins of Lombardy and among the Tyrolean Alps, and 
farther on the north side of the mountains; and probably fresh dis- 
coveries may connect them with the country of the Sarmatians and 
the Scythians. 
Thus at length is fairly opened, for archeology and paleontology 
to read, a new chapter of the world’s history, which begins in the 
pleistocene periods of geology, and reaches to the prehistoric ages of 
man. Did our ancestors really contend, as the poets fancied,* with 
stones and clubs against the lion and the rhinoceros, and thus expel 
them from their native haunts, or have they been removed by change 
of climate or local physical conditions? Was the existence of the 
hyzna and the elephant only possible in Western Europe while a 
climate prevailed there such as now belongs to Africa or India? and 
was this period of high temperature reduced in a later time for the 
elk, reindeer, and musk-ox, which undoubtedly roamed over the hills 
of England and France? If we think so, what a vista of long dura- 
tion stretches before us! for no such changes of climate can be sup- 
posed to have occurred except as the effect of great physical changes, 
requiring a lapse of many thousands of years. And though we may 
think such changes of climate not proved, and probably careful 
weighing of evidence may justify our disbelief, still, if the valleys in 
Picardy have been excavated since the deposit of the gravel of St. 
Acheul,}—and the whole face of the country has been altered about 
the caverns of ‘Torquay since they received remains of animals and 
traces of man, {—how can we admit these facts and yet refuse the 
time required for their accomplishment? First, let us be sure of 
the facts, and especially of that main fact upon which all the argu- 
ment involving immensity of time really turns, viz. the contem- 
poraneous existence of man with the mammoth of the plains and the 
bear of the caverns. The remains of men are certainly 6uréed with 
those of extinct quadrupeds; but did they ve in the same days, or 
do we see relics of different periods gathered into one locality by 
natural processes of a later date, or confused by the operations 
of men ? 
Before replying finally to these questions, further researches of an 
exact kind are desirable, and the Association has given its aid to- 
wards them, both in respect to the old cavern of Kent’s Hole, and 
the newly opened fissure of Gibraltar, from which we expect great 
results, though the best of our labourers has ceased from his honour- 
able toil.¢ When these and many other researches are completed, 
some future Lyell, if not our own great geologist, may add some 
fresh chapters to the ‘ Antiquity of Man.’ 
* Lucretius, v. 964-1283. 
t Prestwich, Transactions of the Royal Society, 1860, and Proc. of Roy. Inst., 
Feb, 1864. a 
+ Pengelly, Reports of the British Association, 1864. 
§ The late Dr.-Hugh Falconer, whose knowledge of the fossil-animals of caves 
was remarkably exact, took a great share in thcse examinations. 
