406 



[Proc. B.N.F.C, 



The lecturer said, — In approaching a subject such as I 

 propose to deal with to-night, carrying us back into the dim ages 

 unrecorded by history or legend, many of the conclusions arrived 

 at must of necessity be hypothetical, and any suggestion of figures 

 entirely out of the question. The Palaeolithic period, or Old 

 Stone Age, which immediately preceded the Neolithic, is not 

 evidenced in Ireland, but in England and on the Continent tools 

 and weapons of this early time are often found embedded at great 

 depths in the drift material brought down by the rivers of melted 

 ice at the close of the Glacial period. The earliest division of the 

 Stone Age is known as the Eolithic or Dawn from the fact of 

 certain flints apparently wrought by man having been found in 

 still older river drifts in England that were afterwards levelled to 

 a plateau by subsequent ice rivers. In pointing out the great 

 antiquity of man the lecturer first dealt with the history of the 

 oldest nation, Assyria, with her wonderful legends of creation, and 

 the inscribed Babylonian cylinder so suggestive of the story in 

 Genesis possibly carries us back to 7,000 B.C., and Egypt certainly 

 does to 5,000 B.C. ; thus we find at these remote ages, not a race 

 of savages, but nations in a state of advanced civilization. What 

 ages must, therefore, have elapsed before these people existed as 

 nations while they were gradually evolving from the condition of 

 the original savage into the highly cultured races as first we find 

 them. Definite proofs of such original inhabitants have been 

 found in Egypt in the form of massive wrought tools made of 

 quartzite, which point to such an enormous antiquity that, in 

 comparison, temple and pylon and pyramid are but things of 

 yesterday. 



Reference was made to the skull recently discovered in a 

 bed of Pliocene remains in Java by Dr. Eugene Dubois, and which, 

 having a brain capacity larger than that of the higher anthropoids 

 and smaller than that of a normal human being, goes far to bear 

 out the accuracy of the belief in a parallel descent of man and the 

 ape from a common arboreal ancestor. 



