President's A ddress. 



199 



threw so much light and order over the latter might have 

 been adopted. But these post-tertiaries being here terres- 

 trial and there lacustrine, here fluviatile and there turbary, 

 here marine and there fresh water, prevent any such arrange- 

 ment, and we must seek some other method more general 

 and provisional. Perhaps the oldest of our post-tertiary de- 

 posits are those raised beaches and marine silts that imme- 

 diately followed the glacial epoch, and in which the remains 

 of seals, whales, and boreal shells are most abundant ; next 

 in order are the lacustrine, fluviatile, and estuarine silts and 

 drifts, marked by the remains of mammoth and other 

 elephantine forms ; then follow the lake and bog silts and 

 peat-mosses, containing bones of deer and oxen ; and lastly, 

 we approach accumulations containing works of human art 

 and civilisation, and this brings us to the dawn of history. 

 In this way we arrive at a cetacean j an elephantine, a bovine, 

 and a historical period ; and this, so far as Europe is con- 

 cerned, might be adopted provisionally and without involv- 

 ing much error. But when we seek to apply it to South 

 America, to Australia, or to any other distant region, it fails 

 as a distinctive arrangement, and we are driven to seek 

 some other that is strictly local, and which can only be co- 

 ordinated in a general way with our European accumula- 

 tions. Altogether the arrangement, or rather non-arrange- 

 ment, of our quaternary accumulations is a reproach to our 

 science, and no finer field presents itself to the young geo- 

 logist who would benefit his study or advance his own repu- 

 tation. Sequential arrangements we must have, and whether 

 these be founded on lithological or on fossil evidence, he will 

 be no mean benefactor to his science who first indicates the 

 way to a solution of the difficulty. 



Antiquity of Man. — And here it may be remarked, that it 

 is this want of sequential arrangements among quaternary 

 deposits that has surrounded the question of the antiquity 

 of man with so much doubt and difficulty. We are every 

 day hearing of the discovery of bones and flint implements 

 in " the drift." But what drift ? Is it the glacial drift, or 

 later river drift? Is it drift formed in times immediately 

 post-glacial, or in ages immediately pre-Ceitic ? At the 



