266 



PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 



either with or without a handle, in the grasp of a "rude barba- 

 rian ;" but nothing more primitive can well be conceived. It 

 was picked up some years since as a curiosity, the nodule being 

 not unlike a human foot in shape, on the top of the debris thrown 

 out of the east cist of the "Warkshaugh barrow during its explo- 

 ration, the same burial mound already referred to in speaking of 

 our ]STorth-Tyne Field Meeting. Associated with it were an 

 ornamented British urn of the food-vessel type, and a thumb -flint 

 like the scrapers used by the Eskimos for preparing skins at the 

 present day. Inhumation and cremation were contemporary 

 burial usages in this barrow, where we thus have some of the 

 characteristics of the Palaeolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Ages. 

 if the people who burned their dead introduced also the use 

 of metal, as we suppose, though no trace whatever of metal 

 was found there. The very site of the burial-mound, only ten 

 or twelve feet above the present level of the North Tyne, is 

 against its extreme antiquity, for it is scarcely above flood-mark 

 now, and the river embankment is carried up into the next field, 

 showing its comparatively insecure position. 



The different periods of pre-historic time, therefore, as we know 

 from many similar instances, overlapped each other. They pre- 

 sented often undoubtedly contemporaneous conditions of human 

 society, and not strictly successive, not separated by vast inter- 

 vals of time, each represented by thousands of years, from one 

 another. In this respect these periods may be compared with 

 the simultaneous deposition of different geological formations 

 going on at present in the ocean-depths in conterminous areas, 

 but which were considered before to be widely severed in point 

 of time. 



Other considerations might be adduced to the same effect. The 

 rate at which the stalagmitic flooring of ossiferous caves, as at 

 Brixham and Kent's Hole, has been deposited, need not take 

 us back into the illimitable past for the period of their human 

 habitation, since we know that at Boltsburn, in "Weardale, 

 three-quarters of an inch of crystalline stalagmite had formed on 

 boards, which had been placed there just fifteen years previous, 



