﻿422 Canadian Record of Science. 



late occupation, yet that, in the south, man may have 

 lived on, though in diminished numbers ; and tliat in 

 some of the caves, such, for instance, as those in the 

 neighborhood of Mentone, there may be' traces of his 

 existence during the transitional period that connects the 

 Pala?olithic and Neolithic Ages. If this were really the 

 case we might expect to find some traces of a dissemina- 

 tion of Neolithic culture from a North Italian centre, but 

 I much doubt whether any such traces actually exist. 



If it had been in that part of the world that the 

 transition took place, how are we to account for the 

 abundance of polished stone hatchets found in Central 

 India ? Did Neolithic man return eastward by the same 

 route as that by which in remote ages his Paheolithic 

 predecessor had migrated westward ? Would is not be in 

 defiance of all probability to answer such a question in 

 the affirmative ? We have, it must be confessed, nothing 

 of a substantial character to guide us in these specu- 

 lations ; but, pending the advent of evidence to the 

 contrary, we may, I think, provisionally adopt the view 

 that owing to failure of food, climatal changes, or other 

 causes, the occupation of Western Europe by Palaeolithic 

 man aljsolutely ceased, and that it was not until after an 

 interval of long duration that Europe was re-peopled by a 

 race of men immigrating from some other part of the 

 globe where the human race had survived, and in course 

 of ages had developed a higher stage of culture than that 

 of Palaeolithic man. 



I have been carried away by the liberty allowed for 

 conjecture into the regions of pure imagination, and must 

 now return to the realms of fact, and one fact on which I 

 desire for a short time to insist is that of the existence at 

 the present day in close juxtaposition with our own 

 civilisation, of races of men who, at all events but a 

 few generations ago, lived under much the same conditions 

 as did our own Neolithic predecessors in Europe. 



