51 
ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING* 
Me. Martin L. Rouse, B.L., in the Chair. 
The Minutes of the previous meeting were read and confirmed. 
Associate. — Miss Ellen Rouse, 10, Leinster Gardens, London, was elected 
Associate. 
The following paper was read : — 
THE INFLUENCE OF THE GLACIAL EPOCH UPON 
THE EARLY HISTORY OF MANKIND. By Rev. 
Professor G. Frederick Wright, LL.D., F.G.S.Am. 
HEN in 1859 Dr. Falconer, Professor Prestwich, Sir 
John Evans, and Sir Charles Lyell with some other 
English geologists returned from a visit to Amiens and 
Abbeville, in the valley of the Somme in northern France, and 
reported their acquiescence in the genuineness of the discoveries 
by Boucher-de-Perthes of rough stone implements in connection 
with the bones of Eleplias primigenius and other extinct 
animals in the “ high-level ” gravels of the Somme, a great 
.sensation was produced in the scientific world. For, as was 
fully shown by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon the 
Antiquity of Man, published in 1863, these discoveries, and 
other similar ones made in different parts of France and in 
.southern England, involved the existence of man during the 
continuance of the Glacial Epoch. Innumerable subsequent 
discoveries both in Europe and America have confirmed this 
conclusion ; and the existence of “ glacial man ” has been very 
generally accepted. 
One of the chief reasons for the general public’s hesitation to 
accept the evidence for glacial man arose from the then pre- 
valent opinion that the Glacial epoch closed about 100,000 
* 6th January, 1908. 
