The President's Address. 



21 



a discovery of my own, although in introducing it into so brief 

 and condensed an account of the history of the subject I must 

 again claim your indulgence as a lecturer. Being in Egypt in 

 1881, and having devoted particular attention to this point, I was 

 fortunate enough to find flint flakes and an implement in parts of 

 the gravel of the Nile near Thebes, into which gravel, after it had 

 become nearly as hard as rock by exposure, the Egyptians had cut 

 the square-topped chambers of their tombs, and I chiselled several 

 of these implements out of the gravel beneath stratified seams of 

 sand and loam in the sides of the Egyptian tombs themselves. 

 These flints, I believe, afforded the first absolute evidence of the 

 priority of the use of flint implements to the time of the building 

 of Thebes, and to a time before the Valley of the Tombs of the 

 Kings had been completely eroded. At any rate it was the first 

 discovery of the kind which had been recorded. I exhibit a section 

 of these gravels, showing the position of the flints and of the tombs, 

 and the seams of gravel, and the implements themselves are also 

 exhibited. I have not been able to go to Egypt since, but I believe 

 that by further search upon that site it may be possible to determine 

 when flint implements were first introduced there, for I could not, 

 after careful search, find them deeper in the gravel than a certain 

 level. If this should prove to be the case it will be an important 

 additional item of evidence. As regards the osteology of the human 

 skeletons discovered in the drift, our knowledge of them appears to 

 develope slowly. If, as I have said, the skeletons of the Ancient 

 Britons are rare, still less frequent must be those of quaternary man, 

 our knowledge of which must depend on the accidental washing of 

 them into drift deposits, or the discovery of them in the floors of 

 caves belonging to that period. For some time it was contended 

 that no approach towards lower forms of life could be recognised in 

 the skeletons of this period, and that the one or two abnormal skulls 

 that had been brought to light were either those of idiots or were 

 the result of disease. But in the presence of additional discoveries 

 of similar skulls and skeletons that have since been made in different 

 parts of the world, and more particularly in Belgium, this position 

 can no longer be maintained. Within the last year two additional 



