72 TRANSACTIONS LIVERPOOL BIOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



before tlie ice-age ; but no remains of that earliest inhabi- 

 tant have yet been found in the Isle of Man. The 

 so-called " River-drift " man has only left his remains in 

 the South and South-east of England up to about a line 

 drawn from the mouth of the Severn to the Wash, while 

 the rather later " Cave " men extended further up to the 

 North of Yorkshire. These were the men of the Palaeo- 

 lithic Age, when the use of metals was not known and the 

 stone implements were rude and unpolished. These 

 primitive weapons, tools and other remains are found in 

 association with the bones of long extinct animals charac- 

 teristic of the Pleistocene period, such as the mammoth, 

 the cave bear and cave lion, the bison, a hyaena, and the 

 woolly-haired rhinoceros. jNTo traces of the presence of 

 man at this early period or of any of such extinct mammals 

 have, however, been found in our district. 



As Great Britain became severed from the Continent 

 before the next race of men, those of the Neolithic Age, 

 spread over the country these must have arrived by sea; 

 and as Man has been an island since even earlier times 

 the successive waves of immigration which swept across 

 from East to West must all have reached our shores by 

 boat — unless, as Lomas has suggested, the sandy coast of 

 North Lancashire may possibly have extended in pre- 

 historic times by way of the Bahama banks to the Point 

 of Ay re. 



The Neolithic or later Stone Age man was of that 

 non-Aryan pre-Celtic race which is usually called 

 Ivernian or Iberian, and is supposed to be related to the 

 Basques of the South of France and Spain. It is doubtful 

 whether Palaeolithic man has left any descendants in our 

 islands, but there is probably a considerable amount of 

 Neolithic blood in the western parts of Britain. Man of 

 the later Stone Age, when the next wave of immigration 



