Sir John Evans, K.C.B. laa 
1872 with the title of ‘The Ancient Stone Implements, Weapons, and 
Ornaments of Great Britain. It at once took its place as the chief 
authority on the subjects of which it treats. The learning displayed in its 
earlier chapters, the careful arrangement of its material, its detailed yet 
interesting descriptions, and the importance attached throughout its pages 
to the stratigraphical position in which the relics had been found showed 
it to be no mere antiquarian enquiry but a treatise conceived and executed 
on thoroughly scientific lines. It had an important influence in connecting 
the pursuits of archeology and geology, by the way in which it marshalled 
the evidence for a chronological sequence in the relics of early man, and 
showed that the conclusions derived from a consideration of varieties in 
types of workmanship were supported by the geological evidence derivable 
from the positions in which these several types were found. In the midst 
of the numerous and multifarious duties which claimed his constant 
attention he brought out a second edition of the work in 1897, greatly 
revised, and incorporating a large amount of new material. 
Although Sir John Evans chiefly occupied himself with the archeological 
side of geology, he occasionally ventured into other parts of the geological 
domain, and his incursions of this kind were always marked by the same 
quickness of insight and shrewdness of inference. It was he, for instance, 
who first detected that the toothed jaw which lay detached on the 
same slab of stone that contained the original specimen of <Archeopteryx 
probably belonged to that ancient type of bird—a surmise which was 
completely confirmed twenty years later by the discovery of a second 
specimen wherein the jaws with pointed teeth lay in place in the skull. 
At another time he devised an ingenious piece of mechanism to illustrate 
how he supposed that great changes of climate might be brought about 
without any shifting of the earth’s axis of rotation. By means of a moving 
wheel, on the rim of which he placed a weight between the pole and the 
equator, he showed that the centrifugal force gradually drew the weight 
towards the equator and he contended that on the supposition that the’ 
interior of our globe is a liquid mass enclosed within a shell of fairly uniform 
density and thickness, the effect of the elevation of a great mountain chain 
midway between the pole and the equator would be to draw the shell over 
the liquid nucleus until the original position of the pole might be moved as 
much as 45° to the south (‘ Roy. Soc. Proc., vol. 15, 1867, p. 46). He subse- 
quently formulated his hypothesis as a definite mathematical problem 
(‘Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc.,’ vol. 32, 1876, p. 62). The mathematicians, 
however, who investigated it did not regard it as tenable, and there were 
formidable objections to his postulate as to the condition of the earth’s 
interior. But Evans, though he bowed to the weight of authority, probably 
never wholly abandoned his view. 
His more purely antiquarian work hardly comes within the purview of the 
Royal Society, but no notice of his life would be complete without some 
reference to that side of his activity. He began early in life to collect and 
