HIS ANTIQUITY AND CHARACTEfilSTICS. 



13 



ments of the gravels of France until the present day, collectors 

 and observers have gone on multiplying, until no museum is 

 without a series of these objects, and numbers are in the hands 

 of private collectors. That these finished tools were the work 

 of men, no one at present denies, although it is worth while to 

 recall that in the early days of the Victoria Institute a paper 

 was read attributing their form to natural causes. It is to 

 be regretted that the pendulum has even swung too far in the 

 opposite direction. Observers from other branches of research 

 have entered the field, who have not sufficiently studied the 

 curious shapes which flints assume naturally, when formed at 

 first in the chalk, nor the forms which accidental breaking and 

 crushing have produced before they were laid to rest in a gravel 

 bed. So we are told to believe in " rostro-carinate " forms ; 

 flints, broken by " pre-crag man " and eoliths," all of which 

 are said to be evidences of man's enormous antiquity, and to carry 

 him back to a period long anterior to the Pleistocene times, where 

 experienced and cautious observers first find him. I have seen 

 and examined a large number of these so-called early evidences 

 of man's handiwork, and after an experience of more than thirty 

 years in handling flints I am at present unable to see in the 

 breakages anything that could not be produced by natural causes. 

 Nor is there in them those unmistakable marks of design which 

 are so characteristic of the true Paleolithic implement. Exagger- 

 ated statements concerning man's antiquity should, therefore, be 

 received with caution, although we must concede that he has 

 had an existence thousands of years beyond the historic period. 

 Even Egyptology has taught us to disregard our ancient systems 

 of chronology. The date of the first dynasty in that country is 

 almost universally accepted, and there was a pre-dynastic Egypt 

 whose remains are undoubtedly sixty centuries old. At this remote 

 period its negroid characteristics were as strongly differentiated 

 as they are now. In actual figures no one cares to express the 

 time that has elapsed since man's handiwork was deposited in the 

 Pleistocene gravels. But geological science teaches us to observe 

 how slowly Nature carries on her physical changes, and tells us 

 that long periods of time must be allowed for the scooping out of 

 the valleys connected with our present river systems, and for the 

 deposition of the thick gravel beds and terraces in which the 

 implements lie. Moreover, evidence is accumulating from a 

 study of the caves and rock shelters in which early man lived. 

 The rude drawings and carvings he has left behind, fresh specimens 



