President's Address. 
iii 
it is in the Aurignacian Age that slender, even dehcate tools of ivory and 
bone make their appearance ; stone lance-heads admirably worked on each 
side, arrow-heads with peduncles, bodkins, saws, &c., are testimony to 
man's increasing industry and skill. 
Not only had by now the sense of art arisen in him, but he expressed 
it in frescoes of admirable colouration, in sculptures on ivory or stone, in 
gravings, petroglyphs, and glyptics which are only equalled by those of 
another living race, the name of which you have already in your mind, 
namely, the Bushman. 
There is not going to be anything very new about this expose of the 
antiquity of man, except that it is nearly up to date, but it is a preliminary 
attempt to try and co-relate, if possible, the Palaeolithic Stone Age of 
Southern Africa with that of Europe and of part of Asia. 
Unfortunately the most important element in the chronology of the 
European divisions, namely, the Great Ice Age, is totally wanting in 
South i\.frica. There the "genial episode" the "period of advance," the 
"glacial episode" and the "period of retreat," — these four parts of the 
oscillation of climate of the third and fourth glacial epochs which have 
played such a role in the succession of faunas and of implements in the 
North, cannot be of any assistance to us in the South. It may therefore 
be assumed that the Pleistocene epoch in South Africa has not altered 
much the land features, and that the temperature or climate has been, 
from the inception of this period little different from what it is to-day. 
And on that account is, in my opinion, explained the contemporaneity 
here of the Chellean, Acheulean, Mousterian, and Aurignacian lithic forms, 
a fact which can no more be doubted than the survival of these forms until 
comparatively a few years back. 
The Eoliths. 
It is obvious that the stone industry must have had a beginning, and 
that an almond-shaped boucher was not evolved by the hand of primitive 
man in the finished state represented by this Saint Acheul boucher of flint, 
or this Stellenbosch boucher of quartzite, now before you. 
That there must have been a graduation from the accidental sharp- 
pointed or sharp-edged flake, which to me is a matter of faith, to the 
carefully trimmed amygdaloid tools I am showing you is to man's mind, 
trained at all events as our mind is now, equally obvious. 
Working, therefore, on this inductive method, certain prehistorians 
have tried to find in more or less amorphous flints or partially split 
nodules of flint the predecessor of the boucher or racloir of the Palaeolithic 
type in position on geological horizons which would throw back the 
antiquity of man to the Oligocene (if not the Eocene) and the Upper 
Miocene, thereby endowing Anthropomorphous Apes — at least so they 
