SELBORNE SOCIETY NOTICES 
77 
by members and friends. The subject of the Lecture was “ Wonders and 
Romance of Insect Life,” and it was illustrated by a large number of very 
interesting lantern slides from photographs taken by the lecturer, many of them 
being in colour. The lecturer traced the life-history of a number of insects, 
which, he said, might be found in any town garden. He pointed out their great 
beauty, and also their marvellous transformations from the egg to the perfect 
insect. Mr. Knock was heartily applauded at the close of his most interesting 
and instructive lecture. 
North Middlesex Junior Branch. — Though no reports have appeared 
recently, yet this Branch has been doing very good work ; many rambles having 
been made during the summer and autumn, and meetings held during the winter, 
when many interesting exhibits have been shown. In October, by the kind 
invitation of Mr. E. A. Bowles, M.A., F. L.S., through Mr. C. M. Hall, 
M.M.S., about a dozen of the members visited Myddleton House and Gardens, 
Forty Hill, when Mr. Bowles personally showed them over his garden. They 
were delighted with the large collections of trees and plants brought from all 
parts of the world, and growing in a natural way in this country. They were 
afterwards hospitably entertained in the dining room of Mr. Bowles. 
A series of country rambles will shortly begin under the direction of Miss 
G. M. Grint, M.C.S., and Miss Lucy Seaman. 
EXCURSIONS. 
Saturday, February i6. — On this afternoon a visit was paid to the Stone Age 
Gallery, in the Department of British and Mediwval Antiquities at the British 
Museum, and a demonstration of pakeolithic man was given by Mr. Reginald 
Smith, Assistant in the Department. Referring from time to time to the adjoining 
cases of exhibits, he sketched the progress of human industry from the earliest 
times to the culminating phase of quaternary life, generally known as the 
Madeleine period, named after the well-known cave in the Dordogne. Palwo- 
lithic man himself could be best studied in the Natural History Branch of the 
Museum, where a series of casts illustrated the evolution of the human skull 
from ape-like forms, and the exhibition there of eolithic and palaeolithic imple- 
ments shows how difficult it is to dissociate early man from his handiwork. A 
few natural history specimens are shown at Bloomsbury, but the bulk of the 
palaeolithic collection falls into two divisions : flints from the terrace gravels of 
rivers, and flint, bone and other manufactured objects from deposits in caves. A 
diagram was used to explain the position and significance of terrace-gravels, and 
a relief-map of the Thames valley showed the area covered at one time or another 
by the Thames in the neighbourhood of London. It was from gravel deposited 
by this river that the first recorded palaeolithic implement was taken towards the end 
of the seventeenth century, and the workmanship of the Gray’s Inn Lane specimen 
explains how it was recognised as human work in association with the bones of an 
elephant (doubtless a mammoth). A century later the Hoxne flints, also 
exhibited, were discovered, and led to the vast discoveries of Boucher de Perthes 
and his succe.ssors. In spite of their enormous age, such flint implements are not 
necessarily the earliest traces of man. 'I'he Selborne Society had recently visited 
Ightham to inspect Mr. Harrison’s series of eoliths, and specimens from the 
North Downs and Belgium were pointed to as being vastly older than the pear- 
shaped and other palaeolithic forms. 
A diagram illustrated the former condition of the Weald and the manner in 
which the drift had been deposited on the Downs, where eoliths ascribed to the 
middle Pliocene are discovered. Further back still, flints generally recognised as 
being of human work, are known from the upper Miocene of Puy Courny (Cantal), 
and specimens were shown from Thenay (Loir-et-Cher), with traces of fire but no 
evident marks of international chipping, though some have brought these forward 
as evidence of man’s existence in the upper Oligocene. In a table case a small 
series of flints illustrated the “ hall-marks ” of human work, especially the bulb of 
percussion, but the wonderful carvings in ivory and engravings on reindeer-horn 
and stone of the cave-dwellers told their own tale, and were indisputable proof of 
high art among people living in the midst of a fauna now to a large extent 
