ETHNOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY. 497 



Lyell, as President of the Geological Section of the British Association, and em- 

 bodies at once the facts and the opinions which an experienced and cautiou? scien- 

 tific geologist considers as at present to be legitimately deducible from such inves- 

 tigations as have yet been made : 



"No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among 

 geologists and the public than the question of the antiquity of the human race: 

 whether or no we have sufficient evidence to prove the former co-existence of Man 

 with certain extinct mammalia, in eaves or in the superficial deposits commonly 

 called drift, or ' diluvium.' For the last quarter of a century, the occasional oc- 

 currence, in various parts of Europe, of the bones of man or the works of his 

 hands, in cave-breccias and stalactites associated with the remains of the extinct 

 hysena, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, have given rise to a suspicion that the date 

 of man must be carried further back than we had heretofore imagined. On the 

 other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt on the part of scientific reason- 

 ers, to admit the validity of such evidence, seeing that so many caves have been 

 inhabited by a succession of tenants, and have been selected by man as a place 

 not only of domicile, but of sepulture ; while some have also served as the channels 

 through which the waters of flooded rivers have flowed, so that the remains of 

 living beings which have peopled the district at more than one era, may have 

 subsequently been mingled in such caverns, and confounded together in one and 

 the same deposit. The facts, however, recently brought to light during the sys- 

 tematic investigation, as reported on by Falconer, of the Brixham Cave, must, I 

 think, have prepared you to admit that scepticism in regard to the cave-evidence 

 in favour of the antiquity of man had previously been pushed to an extreme. To 

 escape from what I now consider was a legitimate deduction from the facts al- 

 ready accumulated, we were obliged to resort to hypotheses requiring great 

 changes in the relative levels and drainage of valleys, and, in short, the whole 

 physical geography of the respective regions where the eaves are situated, — 

 changes that would alone imply a remote antiquity for the human fossil remains, 

 and make it probable that man was old enough to have co-existed, at least, with 

 the Siberian mammoth. But, in the course of the last filteen years, another class 

 of proofs have been advanced, in France, in confirmation of man's antiquity, in'o 

 two of which I have personally examined in the course of the present summer, 

 and to which I shall now briiiifly advert. First, so along ago as the year 1844, 

 M. Aymard, an eminent palaeontologist and antiquary, published an account of 

 the discovery, in the volcanic district of central France, of portions of two hu- 

 man skeletons (the skulls, teeth, and bones) embedded in a volcanic breccia found 

 in the mountain of Denise, in the environs of Le Puy en Velay, a breccia anterior 

 in date to one, at least, of the latest eruptions of that volcanic mountain. On the 

 opposite side of the same hill, the remains of a large number of mammalia, most 

 of them of extinct species, have been detected in tufaceous strata, believed, and 

 I think correctly, to be of the same age. The authenticity of the human fossils 

 was from the first disputed by several geologists, but admitted by the majority of 

 those who visited Le Puy, and saw with their own eyes the original specimen 

 now in the museum of that town. Among others, M. Pietet, so well known to 

 you by bis excellent work on Palieontology, declared, after bis visit to the spot, 



