96 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
beyond the limits of the historic period. Without a clear notion 
of the logic and grounds on which their deductions are founded, 
it would be impossible to enlist the attention of a general audience 
to an address involving data so different from those of ordinary 
scientific work. 
The special subject on which I have to discourse consists of 
some exceptionally interesting human relics, chiefly belonging to 
the Later Palaeolithic period in Europe. These remains have been 
most abundantly found among the culinary debris of a race of 
hunters who inhabited caves and rock-shelters in Prance, Switzer- 
land, South of England, and other parts of Europe. Among the 
more remarkable objects collected in these localities are representa- 
tions of various animals carved, and sometimes sculptured, on 
pieces of ivory, horn, bone and stone. As illustrations of most 
of these artistic productions have been published, I am enabled 
to exhibit some of the more characteristic specimens on the screen. 
But before doing so, there is one question which I had better 
dispose of at once, viz., that of their supposed age, because the 
answer is itself a typical object-lesson of the resourceful means 
by which anthropological investigations are being conducted. 
Whatever views may be held as to the anthropological value of 
the famous skull of Pithecanthropus erectus (figs. 4 and 5), dis- 
covered some ten years ago by M. Dubois in the Upper Pliocene 
deposits of Java, the femur (fig. 6) found in the same stratum 
with it conclusively proves that there had been then in existence a 
being of the genus Homo which had assumed the erect attitude as 
its normal mode of locomotion — i.e. at a time prior to the advent 
of that great landmark in the physical history of the northern 
hemisphere known as the glacial period, Now it was only towards 
the end of that period, just when the ice sheet and its great 
feeding glaciers were creeping back to their primary centres of 
dispersion in the mountainous regions of Britain, Central Europe, 
and Scandinavia, that the European troglodytes, whose antiquity 
is now sub judice , flourished. Hence, they and their works must 
be assigned to an intermediate period between the present time 
and the starting-point of humanity. As the first part of this 
chronological range may be equated with nearly the whole duration 
of the glacial period, the task of converting it into so many cen- 
