BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING. 



397 



BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING. 



The 29th Meeting of the British Association opened on the 14th instant at 

 Aberdeen, under the presidency of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort. 

 The day following the various Sections were opened, that of Geology being 

 under the presidency of Sir Charles Lyell. In his opening addi-ess, he said, 



" No subject has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among 

 geologists and the public than the question of the antiquity of the human race ; 

 whether or no we have sufficient evidence to prove the former co-existence of 

 man with certain extinct mammalia, in caves, or in the superficial deposits com- 

 monly called drift or * dilui'iian' Eor the last quarter of a century the oc- 

 casional occurrence in various parts of Europe of the bones of man, or the 

 works of his hands, in cave-breccias and stalactites associated witli the remains 

 of the extinct hyjena, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, have given rise to a 

 suspicion that the date of man must be carried further back than w^e had here- 

 tofore imagined. On the other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt on 

 the part of scientific reasoners, to admit the validity of such evidence, seeing 

 that so many caves have been inhabited by a succession of tenants, and have 

 been selected by man as a place not only of domicile, but of sepulture, while 

 some caves have also served as the channels through which the waters of 

 flooded rivers have flowed, so that the remains of living beings w^hich have 

 peopled the district at more than one era may have subsequently been mingled 

 in such caverns and confounded together in one and the same deposit. The 

 facts, however, recently brought to light duriim-thc systematic investigation, as 

 reported on by Dr. Ealconer, of the Brixhani Cave, must, I thuik, have prepared 

 you to admit that scepticism in regard to the cave-evidence in favour of the 

 antiquity of man had previously been pushed to an extreme. To escape from 

 what I now consider was a legitimate deduction from the facts already accumu- 

 lated, we were obliged to resort to hypotheses requiring great changes in the 

 relative levels and drainage of valleys, and, in short, the whole physical geo- 

 graptiy of the respective regions where the caves are situated — changes that 

 would alone imply a remote antiquity for the human fossil remains, and make it 

 probable that man was old enough to have co-existed at least with the 

 Siberian mammoth. But in the course of the last fifteen years another class 

 of proofs have been advanced in Erance in confirmation of man's antiquity ; 

 into two of which I have personally examined in the course of the present 

 summer, and to which I shall now briefly advert. Eirst, so long ago as the 

 year 1844, M. Aymard, an eminent palaeontologist and antiquary, published an 

 account of the discovery in the volcanic district of Central Erance of portions 

 of two human skeletons (the skulls, teeth, and bones) embedded in a volcanic 

 breccia found in the mountain of Denise, in the environs of Le Puy en Velay ; 

 a breccia anterior in date to one at least of the latest eruptions of that volcanic 

 mountain. On the opposite side of the same hiU the remains of a large number 

 of mammalia, most of them of extinct species, have been detected in tufaceous 

 strata, believed, and I think correctly, to be of the same age. The authenticity 

 of the human fossils was from the first disputed by several geologists, but ad- 

 mitted by the majority of those who visited Le Puy and saw with their own 

 eyes the original specimen now in the museum of that town. Among others 

 M. Pictet, so well known to you by his excellent work on palseontology, declared, 

 after his visit to the spot, his adhesion to the opinions previously expressed by 

 Aymard. My friend, Mr, Scrope, in the second edition of his ' Yolcanos of 

 VOL. II. L L 



