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bearing on the question. All the alleged cases of the existence of man before 
the Palaeolithic age, on the Continent, seem to me on a careful inquiry to be 
unsatisfactory. If the flints found at Thenay, and supposed to prove the 
existence of Meiocene man, be artificial, and be derived from a Meiocene 
stratum, there is, to my mind, an insuperable difficulty in holding them to be 
the handiwork of man. Seeing that no living species of quadruped was then 
alive, it is to me perfectly incredible that man, the most highly specialised of 
all, should have been living at that time. The flints shown in Paris by Pro- 
fessor Gaudry appear to be artificial ; while those in the Museum of St. 
Germains appear to be partly artificial and partly natural, some of the former, 
from their condition, having been obviously picked up on the surface of the 
ground. The cuts on the Meiocene fossil bones discovered in several other 
localities in Prance may have been produced by other agencies than the hand 
of man. 
Nor in the succeeding Pleiocene age is the evidence more convincing. The 
human skull found in a railway cutting at Olmo, in Northern Italy, and sup- 
posed to be of Pleiocene age, was associated with an implement, according to 
Dr. John Evans, of Neolithic age. Some of the cut fossil bones discovered 
in various parts of Lombardy, and considered by Professor Capellini to be 
Pleiocene, were undoubtedly produced by a cutting implement before they 
became mineralized, a point on which the examination of the specimens leaves 
me no reason for doubt. I do not, however, feel satisfied that the bones 
became mineralized in the Pleiocene age ; and the fact, that only two species 
of quadruped now alive then dwelt in Europe, renders it highly improbable 
that man was living at this time. This zoological difficulty seems to me 
insuperable. 
The only other case which demands notice is that which is taken to establish 
the fact that man was living in the Interglacial age, in Switzerland. The 
specimens supposed to offer ground for this hypothesis consist of a few 
pointed sticks in Professor lliitimever’s collection at Basle, of the shape and 
size of a rather thin cigar, crossed by a series of fibres running at right- 
angles. They appear to me after a careful examination to present no mark of 
the hand of man, and to be merely the resinous knots which have dropped 
out of a rotten pine trunk, and survived the destruction of the rest of the 
tree. As the evidence stands at present there is no proof, on the Continent 
or in this country, of man having lived in this part of the world before the 
middle stage of the Pleistocene age, when most of the living mammalia were 
then alive, and when mammoths, rhinoceroses, bisons, horses and Irish elks, 
lions, hysenas, and bears haunted the neighbourhood of London, and were 
swept down by the floods of the Thames as far as Erith and Crayford. 
