the mountains of Europe, caused by disturbances of climate, which may not 
have affected our ancestors in Mesopotamia. (Cheers.) 
The Chairman. — Perhaps I may help on the proceedings by making a 
few remarks in addition to those of Mr. Howard. I find in this paper 
something like a silent protest against an assumption, which appears to me 
unwarrantable, on the part of persons who seem to be fond of long periods. 
Some people apparently revel in very high numbers. They remind me of a 
scientific man I once heard of. He lived in a country village, about eighteen 
miles from the principal town. He was always dabbling in astronomy, and 
it was said of him that he had been so accustomed to speak of miles by 
millions that when asked by a passer-by the distance to the market town, 
he answered that he did not think it was much more than eighteen millions 
of miles. (Laughter. ) I think that some of these people much resemble 
this man. They are so much accustomed to speaking of thousands of 
millions of miles, that they cannot speak of less than thousands of millions 
of years. Their minds run entirely upon high numbers. When estimating 
the age of deposits, they always seem to assume that these deposits were 
made at a uniform rate. I have never found any proof that they were 
made uniformly. I do not pretend to be a profound geologist, but I have 
given a little attention to the subject, and I fancy I have found very distinct 
proof that they were not made uniformly. If I am right on this point the 
whole foundation of the hundreds of thousands or millions of years is gone ; 
that which is said to have taken a hundred thousand years to form may only 
have taken fifteen hundred years. Not only is it unfair to assume that all 
deposits were made at a uniform rate, it is also unfair to say that they were, 
in every case, made at any rate at all. M. Belgrand asserts that “ the 
change from the large rivers of the palaeolithic age to the small rivers of the 
neolithic age must have taken place suddenly." I remember the late Mr. 
E. Hopkins saying, at one of the early meetings of the Institute, that he knew 
of a very deep formation being made in this way. Whilst travelling in one 
of the valleys of the Andes he passed over a small plain in the mountains. 
Passing by the same place within six months afterwards he found that an 
avalanche had descended, and that there was a deposit on this plain, which, if 
examined by a geological eye, would have been pronounced to be the work of 
some fifty thousand years, while, as he said, it had taken only six months to 
form. I am glad to see in this paper some protest against these modes of 
reasoning, which I cannot but think unfair and misleading. 
Mr. Callard.— There is much in this paper with which I agree, and 
there are some things with which I do not agree. Although I agree 
with you, sir, and with the last speaker, and with the author of the 
paper, that there is no evidence as to 800,000 or 200,000 years back 
being the time of the glacial epoch, yet these figures are not taken at 
haphazard, as might be thought from the remarks that have been 
made. They are based on the theory that the cause of the glacial epoch 
was a great eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. It became an astronomical 
question at what period we had these great eccentricities. Astronomers 
