we know which is at all like it, is that of the Aurora Borealis, 

 and there we are equally ignorant of the element which 

 produces the green line. 



And now to turn to another subject, and one well worthy of 

 your consideration. One of the principal objects to which 

 our members should give their attention is the search for flint 

 implements, arrow heads, hatchets, and fine flakes ; nor, 

 indeed, is any fragment of flint which bears even a suspicion of 

 having altered in its shape, however rudely, without interest, 

 for it is by means of these flint implements that we have been 

 able to ascertain as much as we now know of the life, habits, 

 and even moral character of pre-historic man. Till within a 

 comparatively recent period we were quite content to accept 

 the doctrine that the whole age of created man dated back only 

 some 6,000 years. Before that period we knew there existed 

 various antediluvian monsters — mammoth, mastodon, mega- 

 therium, &c. ; but no one for a moment believed that man was 

 co-existent with them. It is true that some facts, such as the 

 great diversity of races at the earliest historic date, some 

 2,000 or 3,000 years B.C., the information to be gathered from 

 diluvial deposits, &c., &c. militated against this theory, still 

 •' So much the worse for the facts ! " But of late years such 

 decisive discoveries have been made that they have convinced 

 the most sceptical that the age of the world, and even of man, 

 must be counted backwards, not by thousands, but by hun- 

 dreds of thousands of years. Flint implements, arrow heads, 

 hatchets, &c., of undoubted human manufacture, have been 

 discovered in immediate proximity to the bones of long extinct 

 mammalia ; nay, these very bones are found notched with the 

 edge of the primitive flint knife^ cleft for the purpose of ex- 

 tracting the marrow, so dear to the palate of primitive man 

 (a taste which is not yet quite extinct among his descendants), 

 and the rude arrow heads of our forefathers have been found 

 embedded in the skulls of the great extinct cave bear, &c. 

 Thus Baron Bunsen is forced to admit an antiqnity of the 

 human race of 20,000 years, and Sir Charles Lyell is disposed 

 to regard the glacial period, when, as we know, the whole 

 of Northern Europe was shrouded in ice, as representing a 

 period of 800,000 years ago, and from certain data, based on 

 the slow formation of chalk, Sir John Lubbock has calcu- 



