274 
upon the surface, which usually showed 
signs of grinding or polishing, and that in 
fact there were two Stone Ages in Britain. 
To these the terms Neolithic and Paleo- 
lithic were subsequently applied by Sir John 
Lubbock. 
The excitement was not less when, at the 
meeting of this Association at Aberdeen in 
the autumn of that year, Sir Charles Lyell, 
in the presence of the Prince Consort, called 
attention to the discoveries in the valley of 
the Somme, the site of which he had him- 
self visited, and to the vast lapse of time 
indicated by the position of the implements 
in drift-deposits a hundred feet above the 
existing river. 
The conclusions forced upon those who 
examined the facts on the spot did not re- 
ceive immediate acceptance by all who were 
interested in geology and archeology, and 
fierce were the controversies on the subject 
that were carried on both in the newspapers 
and before various learned societies. 
It is at the same time instructive and 
amusing to look back on the discussions of 
those days. While one class of objectors 
accounted for the configuration of the flint 
implements from the gravels by some un- 
known chemical agency, by the violent and 
continued gyratory action of water, by frac- 
ture resulting from pressure, by rapid cool- 
ing when hot or by rapid heating when 
cold, or even regarded them as aberrant 
forms of fossil fishes, there were others who, 
when compelled to acknowledge that the 
implements were the work of men’s hands, 
attempted to impugn and set aside the evi- 
dence as to the circumstances under which 
they had been discovered. In doing this 
they adopted the view that the worked flints 
had either been introduced into the con- 
taining beds at a comparatively recent date, 
or if they actually formed constituent parts 
of the gravel then that this is a mere mod- 
ern alluvium resulting from floods at no 
very remote period. 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Von. VI. No. 138. 
In the course of a few years the main 
stream of scientific thought left this con- 
troversy behind, though a tendency to cut 
down the lapse of time necessary for all the 
changes that have taken place in the con- 
figuration of the surface of the earth and in 
the character of its occupants since the time 
of the Paleolithic gravels, still survives in 
the inmost recesses of the hearts of not a 
few observers. 
In his address to this Association at the 
Bath meeting of 1864, Sir Charles Lyell 
struck so true a note that I am tempted to 
reproduce the paragraph to which I refer: 
‘¢ When speculations on the long series of 
events which occurred in the glacial and 
post-glacial periods are indulged in, the 
imagination is apt to take alarm at the im- 
mensity of the time required to interpret 
the monuments of these ages, all referable 
to the era of existing species. In order to 
abridge the number of centuries which 
would otherwise be indispensable, a disposi- 
tion is shown by many to magnify the rate 
of change in prehistoric times by investing 
the causes which have modified the animate 
and inanimate world with extraordinary 
and excessive energy. It is related of a 
great Irish orator of our day that when he 
was about to contribute somewhat parsi- 
moniously towards a public charity he 
was persuaded by a friend to make a more 
liberal donation. In doing so he apologized 
for his first apparent want of generosity by 
saying that his early life had been a con- 
stant struggle with scanty means, and that 
‘they who are born to affluence cannot easily 
imagine how long a time it takes to get the 
chill of poverty out of one’s bones.’ In like 
manner, we of the living generation, when 
called upon to make grants of thousands of 
centuries in order to explain the events of 
what is called the modern period, shrink 
naturally at first from making what seems 
so lavish an expenditure of past time. 
Throughout our early education we have 
