40 



Palaeolithic age, distributed over South Africa and parts of Polynesia, 

 at a time, says Huxley, when those remote lands formed one con- 

 tinuous tropical continent. If this be so, this primitive type is of 

 an antiquity so vast as to confound calculation. The Turanian — 

 a higher race — probably drove the last to the South, afterwards to 

 be driven itself from Europe to the north and east of Asia. Archseic 

 anthropology, though still in its youth, declares the vast antiquity 

 of man. No more can the age of the human species be numbered 

 by years, unless by years the geological strata and fossil fauna along 

 with which man has left his remains can be reckoned. No more 

 can the dawn of humanity be assumed as a golden age of virtue 

 and intelligence, but as a stone age of barbarism and savagery. 

 Nevertheless, man takes the highest place in the organic series of 

 progression, subject to the inexorable laws of nature. As on the 

 ocean of time successive waves of types and species have risen and 

 fallen, have come and gone, so man has appeared, lived, and disap- 

 peared ; race has followed race ; and races, like species, have their day, 

 and no more. We see the dark races of the world declining before 

 the exterminating march of civilisation; the Caucasian is now 

 dominant — for how long ? Past analogy may indicate the future ; 

 and nature seemingly 



" So careful of the type, but no, 

 From scarped cliff and quarried stone 

 She cries — 'A thousand types are gone; 

 I care for nothing, all shall go.' " 



On Thursday evening, March 18th 1869, Mr. "W. H. Patter- 

 son read a short paper on " Some Ancient Tombstones at the 

 Abbey Church of Movilla. Co. Down." 



The following is a brief abstract of the paper : — 

 You will recollect that one of our excursions of last year 

 included the neighbourhood of Newtown ards, and that one of the 

 places visited was the parish burial-ground, which is situated about 

 a mile to the north-east of Newtownards, on the slope of a hill at 

 a considerable elevation above the town. The ruins of the old 

 Abbey Church of Movilla stand in the burying-grouud. 



