Notices of Memoirs — Antiquity of Man. 269 



Institute for December, 1873, vol. iii.). The phospliatisecl material, 

 which forms stalagmitic layers at the side of and interstratified 

 with the other deposits, is leaden-grey in colour, weathering light 

 brewn outside, friable, and full of small holes. Portions of it 

 yielded, on analysis, a large per-centage of phosphate of lime. 



It is not probable that these deposits were thrown down in a 

 phosphatised condition, as they occur also unphosphatised. 



The beds in which they are found were in places largely made up 

 of the bones of small birds, mammals, etc., which, as Prof. Hughes 

 has shown, are chiefly the remains of the pellets of owls and kestrels ; 

 feathers and skin occurring in the upper, but none in the lower part 

 of the deposit. The only apparent way in which it seems that the 

 travertine could have become phosphatised is by the percolation of 

 water through the pellet bed, until it was stopped by the stalagmite, 

 which would slowly absorb the water, and allow time for the chemical 

 reactions which resulted in the phosphatising of a portion of it. 



A somewhat similar instance is noticed by Prof. Dana (" Coral 

 and Coral Islands," p. 293), who states that a deposit of guano on 

 Rowland's Island has been the means of phosphatising fragments 

 of coral which have somehow become included in its mass. Similarly 

 at Caylus phosphatised matter occurs associated with the bones them- 

 selves ; but in the case of Cave Ha no such matter occurs in the 

 deposits in which the bones are found, but only in the travertine 

 surrounding and associated with the bones. 



D^OTiciES OIF :M::E32VI:oII^S- 



I. — The A^fTIQUITY of Man, Illustrated by the Contents of 

 Caves and the Eelics op the Cave-folk. By Prof. T. Kupert 

 Jones, F.E.S., F.a.S.^ 



PEOFBSSOR Eupert Jones introduced his subject by reminding 

 his hearers that antiquaries can trace back the successive periods 

 of governments and dynasties by the relics and ruins beneath London, 

 from the Georgian to the Eoman age. He referred to Colonel Lane 

 Fox's discovery of an old pile-village of the Eomano-British pariahs 

 in the Finsbury marsh, and to the indications of still older aboriginal 

 wattled huts in pit-dwellings on the gravel subsoil beneath Paul's 

 Cross, in Cheapside. The fossil contents of this gravel, under 

 various parts of London, lead us further back in time beyond the 

 historic andpre-historic ages to what geologists term the "post-Tertiary 

 period," when the Thames, much wider than now, formed great 

 shoals of gravelly shingle, and wide-spread flats of loamy flood- 

 mud, and drifted away the carcasses of mammoth, rhinoceros, lion, 

 urus, musk-ox, and other animals now strange to the district. The 

 relics of man, such as implements of stone, are found here and 

 there, with the bones of these Pleistocene animals in the valley- 

 gravels of the Tliames and its tributaries ; also in similar gravels in 



^ Being the substance of a Lecture delivered to the Croydon Microscopical Club, 

 on "Wednesday evening, April 26th, 1876, in the Public Hall; Henry Lee, Esq., 

 F.L.S., F.G.S., etc., President of the Club, in the Chair. 



