2 



vations in our own district if we only know how, when, and where 

 to observe for ourselves. 



The class of deposits which have yielded the evidence of which I 

 am about to speak, cannot be said to have been altogether pre- 

 viously unnoticed, but it is only during the past ten years that the 

 painstaking, careful investigations of such men as Prestwich, Fal- 

 coner, Lubbock, Lartet, Christy, Pengelly, Evans, Boyd-Dawkins, 

 Sanford, Dupont, and others of the same high stamp, have resulted in 

 the real discoveries and vast additions to our knowledge of this last 

 chapter of geological history heretofore unwritten, and in which Man 

 and the Mammoth take part. 



Let us for a moment retrace the course of these events. So long 

 ago as 1823, that distinguished British geologist, Dr. Buckland, 

 published his celebrated work, the " Beliquice DiluviarKB," in which 

 he described the organic remains contained in ossiferous caverns and 

 fissures, and " diluvial gravel " in various parts of Europe. But the 

 Dean, although so acute a geologist, concluded that none of the stone 

 implements or human remains met with in these deposits could be 

 considered to be as old as the Mammoth and other extinct and foreign 

 animals, with the bones and teeth of which they were associated. 



So little was the study of Geology then understood, that the idea 

 of any remains of man being found in deposits older than those at- 

 tributed to theNoachian deluge was rejected as contrary to Scripture, 

 and generally received opinion. 



At this early period, however, 1824, the late Eev. Dr. John 

 Fleming, F.E.S.E., at that time a minister in the Scotch Presby- 

 terian Church, (afterwards Professor of Natural Philosophy in Aber- 

 deen, and latterly Professor of Natural History at New College, 

 Edinburgh,) contributed an article to the " Edinburgh Philosophical 

 Journal," vol. xi., 1824, " On the Influence of Society on the Distri- 

 bution of British Animals," in which he ably argued against the 

 views of Dr. Buckland, and showed (even from the then com- 

 paratively scanty evidences) that there was incontestible proof of the 

 contemporaneity of the human and animal relics found associated 

 together in these cave-deposits, and that they were clearly the 

 remains of the former denizens of the same region, entombed in 



