546 Man and the Glacial Epoch. 



horses, pigs, several breeds of oxen, the bison, the 

 red deer, the Irish elk, and such like, were the charac- 

 teristic forms of neolithic times. . . . 



How then are all these facts to be accounted for ? 

 . . . The answer which I give to all these queries is 

 simply this the palaeolithic deposits are of pre-Glacial 

 and inter-Glacial age, and do not, in any part, belong to 

 post-Glacial times. They are either entirely wanting, 

 or very sparingly represented, in the midland and 

 northern counties, in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, 

 because all those regions have again and again been 

 subjected to the grinding action of land-ice, and the 

 destructive influence of the sea. But in those districts 

 which were not submerged during the last great depres- 

 sion of the land, and in such regions as were never 

 overwhelmed by the confluent ice-masses, the valley 

 gravels form a continuous series of records from pre- 

 Grlacial times to the present day. ... To the last 

 inter-Grlacial period, then, we must refer the great bulk 

 of the palaeolithic river-gravels of the south-east of 

 England.' 1 



I go further than this, for though it cannot be 

 proved to a demonstration that man inhabited our area 

 in pre-Grlacial times, yet the concurrence of probabilities 

 that he did so is so great, that I have a profound 

 conviction that, at that epoch, here he must have been. 

 I have already more than hinted at his presence in the 

 south, in the caves of Devon shire, while the more northern 

 areas were shrouded in ice (p. 462). If he inhabited 

 the British area during inter-Glacial times, why should 

 he have come at that precise period and not before. It 

 seems to me much more probable that he did live here 

 before the Glacial epoch began, and that he retired to 

 1 Great Ice Age,' pp. 530 and 531. 



