﻿Address. 413 



That the duration of the Palaeolithic Period must have 

 extended over an almost incredible length of time is 

 sufficiently proved by the fact that valleys, some miles in 

 width and of a depth of from 100 to 150 feet, have been 

 eroded since the deposit of the earliest implement-bearing 

 beds. Nor is the apparent duration of this period 

 diminished by the consideration that the floods which 

 hollowed out the valleys were not in all probability of 

 such frequent occurrence as to teach Pakeolithic man by 

 experience the danger of settling too near to the streams, 

 for had he kept to the higher slopes of the valley 

 there would have been but little chance of his implements 

 having so constantly formed constituent parts of the 

 gravels deposited by the floods. 



The examination of British cave-deposits affords corro- 

 borative evidence of this extended duration of the 

 Palaeolithic Period. In Kent's Cavern at Torquay, for 

 instance, we find in the lowest deposit, the breccia below 

 the red-cave earth, implements of flint and chert 

 corresponding in all respects with those of the high level 

 and most ancient river gravels. In the cave-earth these 

 are scarcer, though implements occur which also have 

 their analogues in the river deposits ; but, what is more 

 remarkable, harpoons of reindeer's horn and needles of 

 bone are present, identical in form and character with 

 those of the caverns of the Reindeer Period in the south 

 of France, and suggestive of some bond of union or 

 identity of descent between the early troglodytes, whose 

 habitations were geographically so widely separated the 

 one from the other. 



In a cavern at Creswell Crags, on the confines of 

 Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, a bone has moreover 

 been found engraved with a representation of parts of 

 a horse in precisely the same style as the engraved bones 

 of the French caves. 



It is uncertain whether any of the River-drift specimens 



