470 Notices of Memoirs — Geological Evidence as to 



specially intended, excavation at Tallow Bridge, proved im- 

 practicable, owing to local difficulties. The regular working of 

 the Kiltorcan quarry, however, makes it desirable to secure good 

 specimens as they are turned out, since the owner is the local 

 contractor for roads, and the stone and plant-remains become alike 

 used in making the Kilkenny highways. Short of actual purchase 

 and preservation of the historic site, the alternative is to pay the 

 owner to watch the work as it goes on and to set aside the more 

 interesting material. He has shown a ready appreciation of the 

 requirements of the Committee. 



Hence the Committee asks for its continuance and a grant of 

 £10 for the excavation work at Kiltorcan, and for specimens 

 obtainable in 1915-16. 



The Committee would be glad to be allowed to send, carriage 

 forward, duplicate material of Archceopteris, Bothrodendron, Arehano- 

 don, etc., to the botanical and geological sections of universities, 

 colleges, and museums in the British Empire, where it is found that 

 such specimens would be welcome. Such gifts would, of course, be 

 accompanied by a statement as to the auspices under which the 

 material was obtained. 



(5) The Geological Evidence in Britain as to the Antiquity of 

 Man. By Hon. Professor "W. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S. 



PROFESSOR BOTTLE, in his masterly essay published in Anthro- 

 pologie, xxvi, Jan.-Avril, 1915, freely criticized the evidence 

 on which the antiquity of man in Britain has been stated to go back 

 beyond the early Pliocene age, and concludes that it is not of a nature 

 to throw light on so important a problem. The antiquity of man — 

 or, in other words, his place in the geological record — is a geological 

 question to be decided, like all others, on the lines of a rigid induction. 

 In each case it is necessary to prove, not only that the objects are of 

 human origin, but further that they are of the same age as the strata 

 in which they occur, without the possibility of their having been 

 introduced at a later time. In this communication I propose to apply 

 these tests to the evidence. 



The Pliocene age of man in East Anglia is founded entirely on the 

 roughly chipped flints in the basal Pliocene strata — on eoliths, mainly 

 of the rostro-carinate or eagle' s-beak type of Moir and Lankester. It 

 has been amply proved in this country by Warren, Haward, and 

 Sollas, and in France by Boule, Breuil, and Cartailhac, that these 

 can be made without the intervention of man by the pressure and 

 movement of the surface deposits, by the action of ice, by the torrents 

 and rivers, and by the dash of the waves on the shore. The type- 

 specimens taken to be of human work have been selected out of a large 

 series of broken flints that graduate into forms obviously made by 

 natural fractures. They are, as Boule aptly says, "hyperselectionnees," 

 and can only be rightly interpreted by their relation to the other flints 

 on the Pliocene shore-line. 



As might be expected, if they are due to natural causes, the ' rostro- 

 carinates ' are widely distributed through the basal beds of the Crag 



