TdkE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 595 
GEOLOGY AND PAL AON TOLOGY. 
THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN AND THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 
PRINCIPAL J. W. DAWSON, MONTREAL, P. Q. 
( Concluded. ) 
To return to primitive man and the date of his appearance in Europe, an 
important question is raised by Dawkins in the attempt which he makes to dis-: 
criminate between two races of men supposed to have existed successively in 
Europe in postglacial times or in the Second Continental period. These he calls 
respectively ‘‘men of the river gravels” and ‘‘cave men.” The idea of such 
distinction seems to have arisen in his mind from the fact that in certain caverns 
in England the lowest stratum containing human remains affords only rude imple- 
ments, while an upper stratum appears to testify toimproved manufacture of stone 
tools and weapons ; both strata being of so-called “‘ paleolithic”” age—that is, be- 
longing to the time when certain mammalia now extinct survived. Such facts, 
however, would rather seem to testify to local improvement in the condition of 
certain tribes than to any change of race. Such local improvement would be 
very likely to occur wherever a new locality was taken possession of by a small 
and wandering tribe, which in process of time might increase in numbers and in 
wealth, as well as in means of intercourse with other tribes. A similar succession 
would occur when caves used at first as temporary places of rendezvous by savage 
tribes became afterward places of residence, or were acquired by conquest on the 
part of tribes a little more advanced, in the manner in which such changes are 
constantly taking place in rude communities. Yet on this slender foundation he 
builds an extensive generalization as to a race of river-drift men, in a low and 
savage condition, replaced after the lapse of ages by a people somewhat more 
advanced in the arts and specially addicted to a cavern life; and this conclusion 
he extends to Europe and Asia, finding everywhere and in every case where rude 
flint implements exist in river gravels, evidence of the earlier of these races. 
But his own statements are sufficient to show the baselessness of the distinction. 
He admits that no physical break separates the two periods, that the fauna re- 
mained the same; that the skulls, so far as known, present no differences; and 
that even in works of art the distinction is invalidated by grave exceptions, which 
are intensified by the fact, which the writer has elsewhere illustrated, that in the 
case of the same people, their residences in caves, etc., and their places of burial 
are likely to contain very different objects from those which they leave in river 
gravels. Perhaps one of the most curious examples of this, referred to by our 
author, is the cave of Duruthy in the western Pyrenees. On the floor of this 
cave lay a human skull covered with fallen blocks of stone. With it were found 
forty canine teeth of the bear and three of the lion, perforated for suspension, 
