AUTOMATIC MENTAL ACTION. 28 
discovered in several other localities in France may have been produ ed by other 
agencies than the hand of man. 
Nor in the succeeding Pliocene age is the evidence more convincing. The 
human skull found in a railway cutting at Olmo, in Northern Italy, and supposed 
to be of Pliocene age, was associated with an implement, according to Dr. John 
Evans, of Neolithic age. Some of the cut fossil bones discovered in various parts 
of Lombardy, and considered by Professor Capellini to be Pliocene, were undoubt- 
edly produced by a cutting implement before they became mineralized, a point on 
which the examination of the specimens leaves me no reason for doubt. I do not, 
however, feel satisfied that the bones became mineralized in the Pliocene age; 
and the fact, that only two species of quadrupeds now alive then dwelt in Europe, 
renders it highly improbable that man was living at this time. This zodlogical 
difficulty seems to me insuperable. 
The only other case which demands notice is that which is taken to establish 
the fact that man was living in the inter-Glacial age, in Switzerland. The speci- 
mens supposed to offer ground for this hypothesis consist of a few pointed sticks 
in Professor Riitimeyer’s collection at Basle, of the shape and size of a rather thin 
cigar, crossed by a series of fibers running at right angles. They appear to me 
after a careful examination to present no mark of the hand of man, and to be 
merely the resinous knots which have dropped out of a rotten pine trunk, and 
survived the destruction of the rest of the tree. As the evidence stands at present, 
there is no proof, on the Continent or in this country, of man having lived in this 
part of the world before the middle stage of the Pleistocene age, when most of the 
existing mammalia were alive, and when mammoths, rhinoceroses, bisons, horses 
and Irish elks, lions, hyenas, and bears haunted the neighborhood of London, 
and were swept down by the floods of the Thames as far as Erith and Crayford. 
—American Journal of Science. 
Pov CEOLoOGy: 
AUTOMATIC MENTAL ACTION. 
BY PROF. J. M. LONG. 
The development of the life of man depends upon the dynamic arrangements 
in his constitution for action. Those who study man from both the physiological 
and the psychological point of view, should, therefore, take into the account all 
those springs of action with which the Creator has endowed him. That part of 
the physical nature of man directly concerned in action is the nervous system, the 
functions of which are the generation, transmission and distribution of motion. 
That part of the nervous organism known as the Cerebro-Spinal system may be 
properly termed the Physical Mechanism of Mind, because psychical phenomena 
