445 
moth and fossil bear, perhaps before the channel separated 
France from Eng4and, a race of barbarous human beings 
lived upon the soil of Europe, capable of fabricating rude 
implements of flint. The mind is lost in astonishment in 
looking back at such a vast antiquity of human beings, a 
tribe of men in existence thousands of years before any 
received dates of creation ; savages who hunted with their 
flint-headed arrows the gigantic elk of Ireland and the 
buffalo of Germany, or who fled from the savage tiger of 
France, or who trapped the clumsy mammoth of Northern 
Europe. Who were they P we ask ourselves in wonder. 
Was there with man, as with other forms of animal life, a 
long and gradual progression from the lowest condition to a 
higher, till at length the world was made ready for a more 
developed human being, and the Creator placed the first of 
the present family of man upon the earth ? Were those 
European barbarians of the drift period a primaeval race 
destroyed before the creation of our own race ; and lower 
and more barbarian than the lowest of the present inhabi- 
tants of the world ? Or, as seems more probable, were these 
mysterious beings, the hunters of the mammoth and the 
aurochs, the earliest progenitors of our own family, the 
childish fathers of the human race ? ” 
At the conclusion of the Paper, Mr. Evans, F.R.S., 
humorously alluded to the difference between celt, the 
implement, and Celt, the race known by that name. The 
two names being similar, produced, he argued, a confusion 
of ideas, and as the Saxons pronounced the “ C ” hard, 
he suggested that it would be better to vary the pronun- 
ciation by pronouncing the implement kelt, and the race 
Celt. Without vouching for the accuracy of what he was 
about to propound, he thought it was worthy the con- 
sideration of a Society like this to ascertain whether celts 
