ORDINARY MEETING, January 6, 1879. 
The Rev. R. Thornton, D.D., Vice-President, in the 
Chair. 
The minutes of the last meeting were read and confirmed, and the following 
elections were announced : — 
Members : — Rev. Mark W. Bird, Haiti ; E. J. Statham, Esq.,C.E., A.I.C.E., 
New South Wales. 
Associates : — Rev. W. Guest, F.G.S., Kent ; Rev. C. 0. Mules, M.A., 
New Zealand. 
Also the presentation of the following works for the Library : — 
“ Proceedings of the Royal Society.” From the same. 
“ London Quarterly for 1878.” A . McArthur, Esq., M.P. 
“ Experience and Revelation.” By J. Coutts, Esq. From the Author. 
The following paper was then read by Mr. T. Karr Callard, F.G.S., the 
author being unavoidably absent. 
THE LAPSE OF TIME SINCE THE GLACIAL EPOCH 
DETERMINED BY THE DATE OF THE POLISHED 
STONE AGE. By J. C. Southall, Esq. A.M., LL.D., 
(Richmond, Virginia, U.S.A.). 
T HERE have been various announcements within the past 
ten years of the discovery of traces of man in the mio- 
cene, pliocene, and glacial strata. The Abbe Bourgeois 
still contends that he has found worked flints in a bed of 
miocene date at Thenay ; M. Delaunay thought he had dis- 
covered, in 1869, traces of the hand of man in certain markings 
or cuttings on a rib of the Hqlitherium fossile, a well-known 
miocene species ; M. Desnoyers announced the discovery of 
similarly notched bones, belonging to the Elephas meridio- 
nalis, Rhinoceros leptorhinus, and other extinct animals in a 
pliocene bed at St. Prest; Professor Ramorino made a similar 
announcement with regard to some bones from the pliocene 
strata of the Val d’ Arno ; a human fibula, as was stated by 
Professor Boyd Dawkins, was found some years since under 
glacial clay in the Victoria cave, in Yorkshire; three or four 
sharpened sticks, alleged to have been pointed by human 
tools, were found yet more recently in an inter-glacial bed in 
Switzerland ; besides other instances which it is not necessary 
to enumerate. It is generally conceded now that most of 
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