500 ETHNOLOGY AND ARCHiEOLOGY. 



ties, geographical distribution, and geological succession of organic beings, for 

 which no other hypothesis has been able, or has even attempted, to aecouflt. 



" Among the communications sent in to this Section, I have received from Di*, 

 Dawson, of Montreal, one confirming the discovery, which he and I formerly an- 

 nounced, of a land shell, or pupa, in the coal formation of Nova Scotia. When 

 we contemplate the yast series of formations intervening between the Tertiary 

 and Carboniferons strata, all destitute of air-breathing mollusca, at least of the 

 terrestrial class, such a discovery affords an important illustration of the extreme 

 defectiveness of our geological records. It has always appeared to me, that the 

 advocates of progressive development have too much overlooked the imperfection 

 of these records, and that, consequently, a large part of the generalisations in 

 which they have indulged in regard to the first appearance of the different classes 

 of animals, especially of air-breathers, will have to be modified or abandoned. 

 Nevertheless, that the doctrine of progressive development may contain in it the 

 germs of a true theory, I am far from denying." 



In the same section, on the following day, the Rev. Dr. Anderson took up the 

 main subject of " Human remains in the Superficial Drift," and after reviewing 

 the nature of the various evidence advanced, he thus proceeded: — As to the 

 instances occurring in beds of lakes, rivers, and seas, and which have become 

 mineralized, he contended that a few years, or even months, often sufficed for the 

 formation of a compact durable mass of calcareous and silicious roek, in which 

 liuman bones, skeletons, pottery, coins, and implements were imbedded. He 

 referred to a case betwixt Aberdour and Burntisland, in Fife, which he examined 

 a few weeks ago, where an incrustation was now forming of great depth, and in 

 which are imbedded land shells, branches of trees, and where on the face of the 

 incrusted cliff, twigs of the living trees are becoming entangled in the calcareous 

 breccia. He then quoted the case of a cannon-ball — a thirty-two pounder, — lately 

 presented to him by a fellow townsman, deeply incrusted with ferruginous mud, 

 and completely indurated, which was raised on his anchor in the Harbour of 

 Copenhagen : and, he doubted not, an identical bullet of our naval attack of fifty 

 years ago. The skulls of Amiens and .Abbeville, the remains in the caverns of 

 Torquay, and those in Sicily, the flint weapons in veined limestone in Cantire, and 

 the arrow-heads with elephant remains in Suffolk, were then successively brought 

 under review in the paper — the solution of all these given by Dr. Anderson being, 

 that from the action of petrifying springs, the subsidence of tracts of country, the 

 falliug-in of the roofs of caverns, the undermining of cliffs and headlands, the 

 superficial soil is incrusted or buried beneath the strata on which it was originally 

 superimposed. He saw no evidence dedueible from the superficial drifts to war- 

 rant a departure from the usually accepted data of man's very recent introduction 

 upon the earth. We have more positive evidence that his first appearance was 

 characterized by many proofs of high intellectual condition which our sacred 

 beliefs attach to his origin, and that he was not primarily the ignoble creature that 

 arrow-head?, and flint-knives, and ossiferous caverns would so lamentably indicate. 



