THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 123 
such discoveries point, in greater detail than could be permitted in 
this address, I shall only remark, meanwhile, that those who appear 
to be most startled with the apparent bearings of such discoveries, 
overlook the nearly analogous evidence we already possessed of the 
antiquity of the primeval colonization of the British Isles. Fully 
ten years since, and before the publication of M. Boucher de Perthes’ 
work, in discussing the prehistoric traces of British population, I 
based one important line of argument for its antiquity on the dis- 
covery of artificial lances and harpoons, found beside the gigantic 
Balenoptere of the Scottish drift in the Carse of Stirling. These 
extinct fossil mammals—one of them seventy-two feet long,—lay 
stranded at the base of the Ochills, twenty-one feet above the 
present tide level; and from seven to twenty miles distant from the 
nearest ocean reach. Whatever difficulties may seem to arise from 
the recent disclosures at Abbeville and Amiens, or the older ones at 
Hoxne in Suffolk, in relation to the age of man, the chronology which 
suffices to embrace the ancient Caledonian whaler of the valley of the 
Forth within the period of human history will equally answer for the 
more recently discovered allophylian of the French diluvium. Mean- 
while it may not be unprofitable to note here also the changing 
phases of scientific theology. The difficulty now is to reconcile the 
discovery of works of human art alongside of the fossil mammals 
of the drift. But when, in 1712, certain gigantic fossil bones,— 
which would now most probably be refered to the Mastodon,—were 
found near Cluverach, in New England, the famous Dr. Increace 
Mather communicated the discovery to the Royal Society of London, 
and an abstract in the Philosophical Transactions duly sets forth the 
comforting opinion of the New England divine, of the confirmation 
thereby afforded to the Mosaic Narrative, that there were giants, or 
at least “men of very prodigious stature,’ in the Antediluvian 
world: for one of their teeth, a grinder, weighed four pounds and 
three-quarters, and a thigh bone measured seventeen feet long! Let 
it suffice for the present that geology in all its trustworthy and well 
established evidence still affirms that it is only in the latest post- 
tertiary, or modern strata, that the traces of man and his arts are 
found: ancient indeed when compared with the times of authentic 
history or tradition, but only “of yesterday” when placed alongside 
of the Silurian organisms of our Canadian Decades, or even of the 
vertebrates of Geology’s' comparatively modern Tertiary formations. 
