254 
REVIEWS. 
EARLY MAN IN BRITAIN * 
T HOSE of our readers who have the good or ill fortune (which is it ?) 
of having attained middle age, will remember the pictures of the ancient 
inhabitants of Britain which used to adorn the first page of the History of 
England. Nearly naked figures, adorned with an elegant tattooed pattern, 
and bearing skins on their shoulders as their sole possible protection from the 
inclemency of the weather, represented our primeval progenitors ; and we 
were quite contented with the information that they drove war-chariots with 
scythe-blades attached to the axles, that their priests were the Druids, who 
venerated the mistletoe, and under whose directions Stonehenge was built, 
and that, among other amiable characteristics, they had that of offering 
human sacrifices. At that time, and even later, the learned, although they 
might dispute about Piets and Scots, Celtic migrations, Scandinavian inva- 
sions, and so forth, really knew little more about the matter than the boys 
at school. The History of England began with the ancient Britons, and 
that was pretty nearly all that could be said. 
Prof. Boyd Dawkins would carry the initial chapter of this history much 
further back. For him the preliminaries of human history in any given lo- 
cality may be considered to range over all time, and an acquaintance with 
Tertiary Geology at any rate is essential to the student of man. Thus at the 
outset of his Early Man in Britain, after indicating the close interrelation 
of the three sciences of Geology, Archaeology, and History, he sets forth the 
general principles of Palaeontological succession, and then discusses the 
principal phenomena of the Tertiary epoch, the members of which he classifies 
and characterizes by reference to the remains of mammalia contained in the 
respective deposits. This, of course, is essential to the discussion of the 
question whether man is a Tertiary animal, into which the author enters 
at considerable length. His conclusion with regard to the Eocene and 
Miocene periods is that as none of the mammalia which lived in those 
times are now in existence, ‘It is unreasonable to suppose that man, the 
most highly specialized of all, should have been then on the earth,’ an argu- 
* Early Man in Britain, and his place in the Tertiary Beriod. By W. 
Boyd Dawkins, M.A., F.R.S. 8vo. London. Macmillan and Co. 1880. 
