President's Address. 
199 
threw 80 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^ an elephantine, a hovine, 
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 difiiculty. 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 
