41 
put forward in support of the high antiquity of man has, 
during the past few years, been completely abandoned. 
Thus : — 
The Abbeville human jaw from the gravel of the Somme is 
acknowledged to be a plant."’^ 
The palaeolithic beads of St. Acheul are found to be 
organisms of the chalk.* * * § 
The human bone from the Victoria cavern, which Professor 
Boyd Dawkins once described as establishing the fact that 
man lived in Yorkshire before the glacial period,"’^ and who 
added, that ^^the man to whom it belonged was probably 
devoured by hy8enas,^^t has now been pronounced to be the 
bone of a bear ; J and a cut bone, said to have been 
found in an undisturbed layer in association with the extinct 
mammals in the same cave, belongs to a domestic sheep or 
goat, both of which were unknown in Europe before the 
Neolithic age.§ 
Some of the artistic drawings upon the fossil bones found 
in the Thayingen Cave in Switzerland, are now pronounced 
to be spurious, and the result of intentional deception. The 
same drawings are contained in a work published six years 
before the discovery of the cave.|| 
The reputed discovery of relics of man 800 feet ^deep in 
a Miocene deposit at the Dardanelles, by Mr. Frank Calvert, 
is now utterly rejected. If 
The supposed dressed flints from Miocene beds at Theney,** 
the worked flints from the Pliocene beds of St. Prest, and 
the supposed basket-work from lignite, in Switzerland, have 
all broken down under a searching examination. 
And I claim, on the evidence adduced in former papers read 
before this Society, to have stamped out the evidence of 
Palaeolithic man from the famous cavern of Brixham. But 
above all we are indebted to the Woodwardian Professor of 
Geology at Cambridge for the important statement, — that 
the evidence for the antiquity of man “ has completely broken 
down in all cases where it has been attempted to assign 
him to a period more remote than the post-glacial river 
gravels.-’^tt 
* The Geologist, vol. v., p. 234. 
t Cave Hunting, p. 41 i. 
X Journal of Anthropological Institute, vol. vii., pp. 159, 183. 
§ Early Man in Britain, p. 187. 
!| Nature, November 30, 1876. 
IF The Epoch of the Mammoth, p. 32. 
** Journal of Victoria Institute, yq\, xiii., p. 319. 
ft Ihid., vol. xiii., p. 327. 
