PHYSICAL CONDITIONS— PLEISTOCENE. 343 



Although relics or remains of Palaeolithic man have never 

 yet been discovered in deposits which can be demonstrated to be 

 of preglacial age, yet geologists have long been of opinion that 

 he arrived in our latitude as early at least as the old extinct 

 mammals which were his congeners all through the Pleistocene 

 Period. That he Lived in England during the interglacial epochs 

 cannot be any longer doubted, and since his relics are met with 

 not only in the oldest Pleistocene river-alluvia, but also in the 

 lowest accumulations in our caves, some of which are almost 

 certainly of preglacial age, the general opinion that he was most 

 probably in occupation of England before the advent of the first 

 glacial epoch seems, in the highest degree, likely to be true. 

 Some, indeed, will have it that he entered Europe in Pliocene 

 times, which is, a- priori, not improbable. 



The cut and scratched bones of Mephas meridionalis, Rhino- 

 ceros leptorhinus, Hippopotamus major, and other animals, dis- 

 covered in 1863 by M. Desnoyers, in the upper beds of the 

 Pliocene of St. Prest, have been attributed by him and many 

 geologists to man's hand. By others the evidence has been 

 thought insufficient. More recently, however, M. l'Abbe Bour- 

 geois, an enthusiastic archaeologist, has discovered, in the same 

 deposits, worked flints, about the human origin of which there 

 seems to be no doubt. These gravel-beds, however, although they 

 are usually considered to belong to the Pliocene, are, by some 

 competent authorities, held to be rather of early Pleistocene age ; 

 to be equivalent, in short, to the preglacial deposits which 

 underlie the boulder-clay of Cromer. Indeed it is not impossible 

 that they may even be of interglacial age, for their mamma- 

 lian remains agree closely with those of the interglacial strata 

 of Mont Perrier. 



Professor Capellini has described the discovery in Pliocene 

 strata of the bones of a whale {Balcenotus), which are marked 



the Channel -area during Pleistocene times geologists are indebted, in large 

 measure, to Mr. Godwin-Austen, whose numerous papers, published in the 

 Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, are full of valuable information, and 

 marked by a spirit of philosophical induction, and a breadth of view, which every 

 student of Pleistocene geology must gratefully acknowledge and appreciate. 



