Aveust 20, 1897. ] 
been accustomed to such strict economy in 
all that relates to the chronology of the 
earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so 
fettered have we been by old traditional be- 
liefs, that even when our reason is con- 
vinced, and we are persuaded that we ought 
to make more liberal grants of time to the 
geologist, we feel how hard itis to get the 
chill of poverty out of our bones.” 
Many, however, have at the present day 
got over this feeling, and of late years the 
general tendency of those engaged upon 
the question of the antiquity of the human 
race has’ been in the direction of seeking 
for evidence by which the existence of man 
upon the earth could be carried back toa 
date earlier than that of the Quaternary 
gravels. 
There is little doubt that such evidence 
will eventually be forthcoming, but, judg- 
ing from all probability, it is not in north- 
ern Europe that the cradle of the human 
race will eventually be discovered, but in 
some part of the world more favored by a 
tropical climate, where abundant means of 
subsistence could be procured, and where 
the necessity for warm clothing did not 
exist. 
Before entering into speculations on this 
subject, or attempting to lay down the 
limits within which we may safely accept 
recent discoveries as firmly established, it 
will be well to glance at some of the cases 
in which implements are stated to have 
been found under circumstances which 
raise a presumption of the existence of 
man in pre-Glacial, Pliocene, or even Mio- 
cene times. 
Flint implements of ordinary Paleolithic 
type have, for instance, been recorded as 
found in the eastern counties of England, 
in beds beneath the chalky boulder clay; 
but on careful examination the geological 
evidence has not, to my mind, proved satis- 
factory, nor has it, I believe, been generally 
accepted. Moreover, the archeological dif- 
SCIENCE. 
275 
ficulty that man, at two such remote epochs 
as the pre-Glacial and the post-Glacial, even 
if the term Glacial be limited to the chalky 
boulder clay, should haye manufactured 
implements so identical in character that 
they cannot be distinguished apart seems 
to have been entirely ignored. 
Within the last few months we have had 
the report of worked flints having been dis- 
covered in the late Pliocene Forest Bed of 
Norfolk, but in that instance the signs of 
human workmanship upon the flints are by 
no means apparent to all observers. 
But such an antiquity as that of the 
Forest Bed is as nothing when compared 
with that which would be implied by the 
discoveries of the work of men’s hands in 
the Pliocene and Miocene beds of England, 
France, Italy and Portugal, which have 
been accepted by some geologists. There 
is one feature in these cases which has 
hardly received due attention, and that is 
the isolated character of the reputed dis- 
coveries. Had man, for instance, been 
present in Britain during the Crag Period, 
it would be strange, indeed, if the sole traces 
of his existence that he left were a perfo- 
rated tooth of a large shark, the sawn rib of 
a manatee, and a beaming full face, carved 
on the shell of a pectunculus ! 
In an address to the Anthropological 
Section at the Leeds meeting of this Asso- 
ciation in 1890 I dealt somewhat fully with 
these supposed discoveries of the remains 
of human art in beds of Tertiary date, and 
I need not here go further into the ques- 
tion. Suffice it to say that I see no reason 
why the verdict of ‘not proven’ at which 
I then arrived should be reversed. 
In the case of a more recent discovery 
in Upper Burma, in beds at first pronounced 
to be Upper Miocene, but subsequently 
‘definitely ascertained to be Pliocene,’ 
some of the flints are of purely natural and 
not artificial origin, so that two questions 
arise: First, were the fossil remains associ- 
