Address of A. R. Wallace at the Glasgow Meeting. 878 
long distant past. The antiquity of the races thus discovered 
can only be generally determined by the successively earlier 
and earlier stages through which we can trace them 
go back, inetals soon disappear and we find only tools and 
weapons of stone and of bone. The stone weapons get ruder 
and ruder; pottery, and then the bone implements, cease to 
occur; and in the earliest stage we find only chipped flints, of 
rude design though still of unmistakable human workmanship. 
n like manner domestic animals disappear as we go nae : 
and though the dog seems to have been the earliest, it is doubt- 
ful whether the makers of the ruder flint implements of the 
gravels possessed even this. Still more important as a measure 
of time are the changes of the earth’s surface—of the distribu- 
tion of animals—and of climate—which have occurred during 
the human period. At a comparatively.recent epoch in the 
record of prehistoric times we find that the Baltic was far salter 
than it is now, and produced abundance of oysters; and that 
Denmark was covered with pine forests inhabited by Capercail- 
aes, such as now only oceur further north in Norway. ittle 
earlier we find that Reindeer were common even in the South 
y 
had streams flowing through them, at least in times of floods— 
and this often implies that vast masses of solid rock have since 
d led beneath two separate beds of stalagmite, each having a 
“'stinet texture, and each covering a deposit of cave-earth hav- 
Pe differential characters, while each contains a 
istinet assemblage of extinct animals. 
- briefly, are the results of the evidence that has been 
a JY accumulating for about fifteen years as to the antiquity 
a liken: and it has been confirmed by so many discoveries of 
owe in all parts of the globe, and especially by the 
of parison of the tools and weapons of prebistoric man with those 
Pater Savages, so that the use of even the rudest flint im- 
* Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, fourth edition, p. 115. 
