339 
workings, where the ancient people dug down to the flints and dressed 
them, leaving the bits they knocked off behind them, and these bits have 
been found lying about in heaps of hundreds. 
Mr. C allard. — Do you find them at St. Acheul. This [the flint in ques- 
tion] comes from that place. I brought it myself, and, as far as I know, 
there is no indication of any workings there. 
Professor Hughes. — In the particular place where you picked that up 
they may not have been working ; but they did not use these implements 
only in the place where they were worked. You may find them carried 
by man or by streams. Then there were half-made implements and 
misfits. That is one reason why we find such an immense number ; they 
threw these away. Mr. Topley has asked me to say what multiple I will 
take. That I will not say ; but I think it must be a large one. That, 
however, is only my opinion ; I have no data to go upon. I think, 
however, we must feel that .the time is much greater than we have been 
accustomed to deal with in studying history. When I am asked how 
far off a man is, I may say I do not know the exact distance ; but I can say 
whether it is further than W estminster. And when astronomers tell us that 
they knock off two or three millions from the distance of the sun, do we feel 
inclined to say to them, “As you are not sure about the distance, perhaps the 
sun is only a mile or two off ? ” No, we do not ; we allow the correction, still 
leaving as the measure of the sun’s distance those enormous quantities which 
it is difficult to grasp at all. As to the distribution of the bears and the other 
mammalia, I think I have left a sufficient margin. I talked of a period 
within which all those paleolithic times are included. When subdivi- 
sions could be made to correspond, well and good. There is reason for 
the bears and hyaenas not being found together. The bears did not get 
on well with the hyaenas, and where you do find them together the bears 
have the worst of it. In some great caves in the Pyrenees there is hardly 
anything but bears, and there the skeletons of the bears are found quite 
whole and entire. These were the dens they lived in, and whither they 
dragged themselves to die ; in other caves there were only found portions of 
the remains of bears, because these were parts of carcasses dragged in by 
other creatures and eaten. Then, in the older cases, the groups of life are 
so different from those of to-day that if we were to find any traces of man 
we should not expect to find him as he is now, and it was on this hypothesis 
that some French savans said they would refer the earlier instances to 
Man’s precursors. (Applause.) 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
