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This identical skillet, a writer quoted by Bancroft says will be sent to a 
state fair in America as a specimen of crockery used in the mines several 
thousand years ago. If there were mines, as I said before, the difficulty is 
gone. The finding of relics in a Pliocene stratum no more proves that man 
was Pliocene than the finding of a pickaxe in a coal-mine would prove that 
man belonged to the carboniferous period. Deference is made on page 2 to my 
having sent to the author a piece of the tusk of a mammoth, part of a 
specimen sent to me from Archangel, in which the ivory is in so fresh a 
condition that it has been shaped into a chequer by an ivory-turner, which 
indicates — I do not say proves — that the extinct mammal has not been so long 
extinct as is generally supposed. I have brought a chessman here that has 
been turned out of a mammoth tusk, and it has such an appearance of fresh- 
ness that neither the eye nor the tongue can detect any indication that the 
animal to which it belonged lived 200,000 years ago ; and the finding of 
certain implements along with the mastodon, mentioned in this paper, 
would not to my mind convey the idea of any considerable antiquity. 
On page 3 reference is made to the views of Professor Dawkins, who has 
given, from a zoological point of view, his reasons for believing that man 
did not exist in the Miocene period. The first appearance of man, according 
to Professor Dawkins, is in the Pleistocene. But whilst Professor Dawkins 
does not hold that man lived in the Miocene period, yet he does hold to 
the antiquity of man ; and it is a very considerable antiquity that he would 
claim for man, the proof of which rests on the finding of assumed stone 
implements. At Erith, now, these implements are not to my mind 
at all convincing. I have a figure of one here. It must be remembered 
that chipped flints were found in the Miocene period, flints so chipped that 
good authorities believe them to have been chipped by the human hand. 
If flints chipped so as to resemble human implements are found in the 
Miocene strata, and man was not there at that period, then the finding of 
chipped flints must no longer be regarded (without some collateral evidence) 
as sufficient proof of the existence of man at the period to which they relate. 
Professor Gaudry, I presume, saw this difficulty ; neither he nor Professor 
Dawkins believe in the existence of man in the Miocene period ; but yet 
there was the fact before them that chipped flints had been found ; and if 
somebody must have chipped them, and no man existed to have done it, 
it must have been done, suggests Professor Gaudry, by some anthropomorphic 
ape. Professor Dawkins thinks that this is highly probable. I think it is very 
improbable, and I would on this point ask the question, if an ape chipped 
these flints in the Miocene period, why may not an ape have chipped the 
flint, the drawing of which you have before you ? And if he could have done 
this, then I say the finding of the Erith flint does not prove that man existed 
at the time that it was chipped. Professor Dawkins seems to have antici- 
pated this remark, for he suggests that the ancient ape might have been 
much in advance of the existing ape : he admits that the ape of the 
present day could not have done it. And this leads me to another point. 
