205 
year, carried by the force of these streams. This is a fact that strikes 
one on visiting these places, and it seems to me to dispose of the 
evidence for extreme antiquity which is proposed by Professor Whitney. 
One really is almost afraid to advance anything against the State geologist of 
California ; but my own view is that simply of an observer, and when I 
observe the tertiary strata, which he says are contemporaneous with the 
gravel on one side, are on the other side covered by the gravel, I think there 
must be a mistake ; and when I observe the displacements which have been 
taking place in these drift deposits in the search for gold, I think he must 
have been mistaken also in supposing that any chronology can be esta- 
blished from them. 
The Chairman. — My duty is, first of all, to return our thanks to Dr. 
Southall for his admirable paper, and then to Mr. Pattison, not only for the 
able manner in which he has read it, but also for the interesting remarks 
which he has added. Before the discussion commences, some “communica- 
tions ” have to be laid before you : Principal Dawson’s is taken first, as the 
others refer to it. 
The following communication from Principal and Vice-Chancellor J. W. 
Dawson, C.M.G., LL.D., F.R.S., of McGill University, Montreal, was then 
read : — 
“ December 30th, 1880. 
In answer to your communication accompanying Dr. Southall’s paper on 
Pliocene Man, I have much pleasure in stating that I concur in general in 
the conclusions of the paper, several of which I have indeed already 
argued for in previous publications. 
There should, I think, now be no doubt as to the modern and even 
historic character of the remains of man usually known in Europe as 
‘ Neolithic.’ Their nature and mode of occurrence are in no respect 
different from those of the historic aborigines of America, no material 
physical or faunal changes have occurred since their time, and the identity 
of the Neolithic men with tribes still extant in Europe, as the Basques 
and Lapps, has been again and again insisted on. I regard the whole 
of these remains as coming within the dates of the historic empires of 
the East, and as being historically post-diluvian, and geologically recent. 
As to the so-called ‘ Palaeolithic,’ or, as I have preferred to call them, 
Palceocosmic men, those of the older cave and gravel deposits ; while I can 
see no good reason for the view recently advocated by Dawkins, that the 
race of the gravels is older than that of the caves, I agree with him that 
both are in all probability post-glacial, and referable either to the close of 
the Pleistocene or the beginning of the modern period. For reasons which I 
have stated in a recent review of Dawkins’s valuable work on 1 Early Man 
in Britain,’ I prefer the latter classification, and have stated the arrangement 
adopted by me, in various papers and other publications as follows : — ‘ On 
