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sharks’ teeth ? The difficulty was, that when the shell-fish went into the 
stone it went there to live, and did not drive its way through ; like a 
rabbit, it made a burrow. In the case of these teeth, whatever had made 
the hole had gone in at one end and out at the other. He had brought with 
him an ordinary tumbler containing about 100 of them. The sharks’ teeth 
of the present day were about an inch and a quarter in length. 
The Chairman. — With regard to what Mr. Charlesworth has said about 
caution, I do not think I can do better than read a part of the Address of Mr. 
John Evans, F.R.S., before the Conference on the question of the Antiquity of 
Man, of which he was President ; it was held in May, 1877. He says, after 
alluding to several recent discoveries in France, Spain, and Switzerland, 
“ Each successive discovery, or presumed discovery, must be received in a 
cautious but candid spirit, and, looking to the many sources of doubt and 
error which attached to isolated discoveries, our watchword must for the 
present be, — ‘ Caution, caution, caution ! ’ ” 
The meeting was then adjourned. 
DR. SOUTHALL’S REPLY. 
I do not desire to add anything to what I have said, except to notice a 
remark of Professor Hughes, that he “ is sorry that the author has gone out of 
his way ... to sneer at the cautious Lyell and the clear-headed Lubbock.” 
I had said in the beginning of my paper, as an introduction to what followed, 
that “ I presumed that few now attach any importance to the evidences for 
the antiquity of the race derived by the late Sir C. Lyell, Sir J. Lubbock, 
and others, from the ancient stone graves, the objects found in the Danish 
peat, the shell-mounds of Denmark, and the lake dwellings of Switzerland ” 
Sir Charles Lyell suggests, in his Antiquity of Man, an antiquity of 
several thousand years for the mound-builders of the Ohio valley. Sir John 
Lubbock suggests “ three thousand ” years, intimating that it may be perhaps 
far more. 
Sir John Lubbock devotes a large space to the tumuli and stone graves. 
He indicates his opinion of the remote antiquity of some of them by referring 
them to the stone age, and, speaking of the circle of Abury, he cites Stukeley 
as of the opinion that it was founded in 1859 b.c. I have no doubt, 
however, that he regarded that as far below the truth. 
Both of these writers, while abstaining from very specific figures, imply a 
very high antiquity for the stone implements found in the lower layers of 
the French and Danish peat. Both of them refer to the fact that the vege- 
tation of Denmark has changed several times since the Stone age in that 
country, and they both cite the calculations of M. Boucher de Perthes with 
regard to the time required for the formation of the peat of the Somme 
valley, whose estimate involved the lapse of some 30,000 years. 
