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Eev. J. M. Mello. — I have to express my thanks to the President and 
Council of this Society for having kindly given me the opportunity of being 
present this evening, and taking part in the discussion on the interesting 
subject which has just been brought before us. 
The question for our consideration is one of great difficulty ; indeed, I doubt 
very much whether, in our present state of knowledge, we have anything like 
sufficient facts to enable us to form any decided opinion, whether we ever 
shall have a sufficiency, is perhaps doubtful ; any way, I think that our work 
at present should be rather to accumulate facts without being too careful to 
form theories upon the few we have ; as to the result, I have no doubt what- 
ever that as it has ever been in the past, the more we know of the works 
of the Great Creator the more reason we shall have to see one and the same 
Divine Hand in the Word inscribed on the face of Nature, and that written 
in the sacred documents of our religion. 
I must now ask your indulgence whilst calling attention to several points 
in the paper we have heard read, in which the author has, I am sorry to say, 
greatly misapprehended some of the facts derived from the exploration of the 
Cresswell Caves. In a question such as that before us, it is, I conceive, of the 
utmost importance that every fact on which we take our stand should be in- 
controvertible, otherwise the argument, however strong it may be in some 
respects, will serve but to confirm its opponents in their own views ; and 
agreeing as I do with with Mr. Callard that we have no evidence at present 
which forces us to assign a practically unlimited antiquity to our race, and 
also believing that there is much which disproves it, it will yet be a very 
dangerous thing if we base any of our arguments on fallacies. The inference 
Mr. Callard appears to draw from the Cresswell explorations is that our 
Derbyshire men were not those commonly known as Palaeolithic, and that the 
rhinoceros and hyaena and other Pleistocene animals, which he allows to have 
been their contemporaries, were themselves living in this country with the 
Roman and Samian potters ; and that, it may be observed, if there is any 
truth in the generally received views as to the date of the articles of Roman 
art found in British caves, would give us a date somewhere about the fifth 
or sixth centuries of our own era ! This conclusion is arrived at through a 
misunderstanding of the results of our digging, and you will perhaps allow 
me to lay those results before you as briefly as I can. 
If the Cresswell Caves are remarkable for one thing more than another it 
is that in them we have the clearest proof that has ever been afforded of a 
chronological progress in civilization amongst the earliest occupants of this 
country. Mr. Callard says of this Derbyshire man that ho was “ most 
assuredly not Palaeolithic man ” ; if he was not, then Palaeolithic man has 
no existence anywhere. A section of the floor of the Cresswell caves presents 
to our view a perfect and well-defined succession of beds of different litho- 
logical character : at the bottom we have red argillaceous sand ; over this 
comes the cave earth, in various stages; then the breccia; and, above all, the 
thin surface soil. Palaeolithic man in his earliest condition was undoubtedly 
