319 
as to which cases we may accept as proved, will then consider 
the changes which have taken place since the date to which 
in the present state of the evidence we can with certainty 
assign his earliest known appearance. 
We may dismiss at once the case reported from the Dardan- 
elles of works of art found in deposits said to be of Miocene 
age. The descriptions* prove that it was not given on the 
authority of one competent to judge in such a case, and it never 
was confirmed. 
Another instance referred to the same period we must con- 
sider more in full, because the evidence has been accepted by 
men of high authority in France.f In beds said to be Miocene, 
at Thenay, near Pontlevoy, the Abbe Bourgeois found flints 
which he supposed were dressed by man. These flints are 
now exhibited in the Museum at St. Germains, where I saw 
them with Sir Charles Lyell several years ago, and again with 
others since. Some of them seemed entirely natural, common 
forms, such as we find over the surface everywhere, broken by 
all the various accidents of heat and frost and blows. A 
few seemed as if they might have been man’s handiwork, 
— cores from which he had struck off flakes such as we 
know were used by early man, of which I show examples. 
Yet this is not quite clear, for, had the evidence been good 
that they were found in place there still would have been 
a doubt whether they were man’s work. But when we came 
to inquire about the evidence that they occurred in beds of 
Miocene age, we learned that only those that we put down as 
natural were found by the Abbe himself; the others were 
brought in by workmen, picked up, we may suppose, upon 
the heaps turned over by their spades, and so perhaps just 
dropped down from the surface. 
When all the other higher forms of life were different it was 
not probable that man should have been the same, even when 
we remember that his intellect allowed him to adapt himself 
unmodified to different states of life, taking the clothing of 
the meaner brutes for his own use, and lighting fires and 
building homes, anticipating the future in more various ways 
than they. It would require the clearest evidence in such a 
case to prove that man was there, or that some other form as 
“ man’s pi’ecursor” represented him, but such evidence there 
is not. 
* Journ. Anthrop. Inst., vol. iii. April, 1873, p. 127. 
t Bourgeois, “ fitude sur des Silex Travailles trouves dans les Depots 
Tertiaires de Thenay (Loir et Cher).” — Congrcs International (V Anthrop. 
et d’Archeol. Prehist. 2me. Session, Paris, 1867. Harny. Palcont. Hum., 1870. 
