vi Transactions of the Boyal Society of South Africa. 
deposits we eDcountered. Maufe was looking for the geological features. 
I was interested in the lithic industry. 
Now chert, whether chalcedony or under any other name, is a siliceous 
formation, just like flint, only that the latter is an accumulation of silica 
round an organic remain, whereas the latter is not, but the texture is 
nearly alike ; and the influence of natural causes — heat in the present 
case, frost in that of the European or Palaearctic region — had produced an 
effect nearly similar, but not quite identical all the same, because discoidal 
pieces are extremely rare in European Palaeoliths or Neoliths. Moreover, 
crescent-shaped pieces (the ijieces d cncoche of the French) are there 
quite common, and were it not that real artefacts were found together, 
as testified by these not easily expressed minutiae which seldom lure the 
trained archaeologist from the path of orthodox righteousness, one might 
ha\e felt inclined to imagine he had discovered a new site of Kent 
Plateau implements. 
If we now recapitulate the details of the question of the so-called 
eoliths we shall find that the then numerous, but now greatly reduced, 
believers in the authenticity of these artefacts found in remote times 
known to geologists as, if not Eocene proper (the dawn of recent times), 
at least Ohgocene, Miocene, and Pliocene horizons or formations, had to 
call in support of their theory the existence of these geological times of 
Anthropomorphous Apes, or Simian-like men. 
No one now pays much attention to the hypothetical presence of a 
semi-human precursor, Homosimius, to explain the Oligocene "flints," 
and the once-invoked Dryopithectis (a monkey of the Middle Miocene, the 
remnants of which were found not very far from the Thenay and Aurillae 
"flints "), is now, as stated before, not only excluded from the genealogy 
of the human race, but is considered to be very inferior to some of the 
present apes. 
But the theory of the Simian origin of man was still being entertained 
by palaeontologically minded antiquarians, when in 1894 Dr. Dubois, a 
Dutch Palaeontologist, unearthed at Trinil, in the island of Java, the 
remains, unfortunately very incomplete, of an animal to which he gave 
the name of Pithecanthrojjits, or monkey-man, which, according to him, 
was the missing link said to have been announced by Darwin, although I 
cannot find the latter ever said so in formal terms, and hinted at, it is also 
said, by Lamarck, although there also I cannot find evidence of the 
proposition. 
It is somewhat unfortunate that more remnants of the Pithecajithropus 
have not been found as yet ; and its position in the scale of humanity is 
certainly not accepted by all competent men as Dr. Eugene Dubois would 
have liked. Eeferred at first to the Pliocene, leading us thus to the 
mythical but long-invoked Tertiary man, it is now relegated on good 
