KEYIEIYS. 
65 
The facts regarding the Engis and Neanderthal skulls have been in the 
older editions, and there is not much additional matter to be added to them. 
We fancy, however, that had the author sought out in the proper directions 
he might have been able to give vastly fuller information in regard to the 
Irish lake-dwellings. Geologists are not numerous in Ireland, but archaeo- 
logists are, and we fancy that had Sir Charles Lyell inquired of some of the 
many people connected with that very useful association, the u Kilkenny 
and South-east of Ireland Archaeological Society,” he would have been 
enabled to give more fully the facts of these structures, which now he 
appears to conclude are entirely different from their Swiss and New Guinea 
relatives. 
There is a deal of important evidence cited in regard to the exploration 
of Kent’s Cavern, and some important remarks are made on the subject of 
the teeth of Machairodus. Mr. Pengelly is opposed to Mr. Boyd Dawkins as 
to the position of this animal. The latter is inclined to place it in a lower 
deposit than Mr. Pengelly. That, however, will not much affect the import- 
ance of the discovery Mf its teeth. Besides, Mr. Pengelly’s idea that the 
teeth are not mineralised as the .bear’s bones are, does not appear to us a 
very formidable objection. For he must remember that the layers of 
enamel do not normally contain more than two per cent of animal matter, 
and that the dentine contains vastly less than the ordinary bones of a bear. 
Still, however, his objection is worthy of attention. “If, as I believe,” says 
Sir Charles Lyell, “ it was contemporary of the mammoth and hyaena, it 
still lived on in England after the works of man had already been entombed 
in the red loam (No. 7 in the deposit of the cave) and sealed down with a 
floor of stalagmite. And if it was derivative from the Breccia, man was 
still equally its contemporary in that early period.” With regard to evi- 
dence of the antiquity of man, which is derived not from geology but from 
history, as it is being now investigated, the author gives us a series of records 
which point to the fact of civilisation having been in existence in Egypt at 
a time when, according to our common notion, God was beginning to create 
the world. He says, “We cannot contemplate the average size and num- 
ber of the pyramids now extant [upwards of forty, large and small], to say 
nothing of the inscriptions on them, without supposing them to have been 
the work of a long succession of generations. Yet the best authorities 
believe that these pyramids were built more than 3,000 years before the 
birth of Christ, and we find evidence that the Egyptians had then attained a 
settled government , an advanced state of the arts, and extended commercial 
intercourse” 
What Sir Charles Lyell says in regard to the difficulty of species 
lovers at the present day is strictly and rigidly true, but we had no idea 
that the view was as old as Lamarck. The author says, “ What Lamarck 
then foretold has come to pass; the more new forms have been multiplied, 
the less are we able to decide what we mean by a variety, and what by a 
species.” It is undoubtedly the case at present, that all naturalists of any 
note find the defining of a species a question which is absolutely impossible, 
if the definition is to be held exactly. In reference to the antiquity of man 
the question is not devoid of interest as to how man came into the world, 
and of course the author’s views on this question are like those of most 
YOL. XIII. NO. L. 
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