THE GLACIAL PERIOD. 251 



Prestwich, have strongly maintained that the ancient river- 

 drifts which occur in the south of England (and by implication 

 those of the north of France also) must be of postglacial age, 

 since in some places the English deposits have been proved by 

 superposition and other tests to be of later date than a particular 

 boulder-clay in East Anglia. Which, then, of these two appa- 

 rently conflicting views is true ? It cannot be denied that certain 

 ossiferous and implement-bearing beds in England are younger 

 than the boulder-clay or morainic material they rest upon ; but, 

 on the other hand, it is a fact equally beyond question, that 

 relics and remains of Palaeolithic man, together with bones of 

 the extinct and no longer indigenous mammalia, have been met 

 with in and underneath the loss or ancient flood-loams of the 

 Glacial Period. Did Palaeolithic man inhabit North-western 

 Europe before the advent of the Ice Age, and, surviving all the 

 chances and changes of that period, did he live on in our con- 

 tinent after the severity of the climate had disappeared and 

 given place to conditions which enabled the hippopotamus to 

 range as far north as Yorkshire ? These queries I will now 

 attempt to answer, but in order to do so we must return to our 

 study of the glacial deposits, for, as we shall find, it is only 

 after a close analysis of their evidence that we can hope to 

 obtain a satisfactory explanation of those apparently contra- 

 dictory facts which have so exercised the ingenuity of palaeonto- 

 logical students. 



