44 
of persons as genuine, and then up comes some person who knows moie 
about the subject and says the things are a fraud. It seems to me that all 
these things ought to be taken with great caution, and that there ought to 
be a history and pedigree along with each, so that they should not be generally 
accepted for a great many years, and then characterised by some one as not 
genuine. It strikes me that there is much want of the missing link between 
the instruments as they are brought before the eve of the public, and the 
historical verification of the antecedents of those things which are produced 
to prove a human antiquity of many scores of thousands of years. 
Dr. T. CoLAN, R.N. (Deputy Inspector-General of Hospitals and Fleets). — 
In reference to the point as to the antiquity of the Stone age, I should like to 
say that I have known of men in the present century who practise the art of 
making stone implements. It was my lot to be Fleet Surgeon in the last 
Arctic Expedition, which, it will be remembered, got within 400 miles of the 
North Pole. While on that expedition, I inquired into the habits of the 
Esquimaux, and I found that in the coffins of their dead they placed stone 
implements, such as arrow-heads. It is well known that the persons with 
some of whom these things were buried existed within the present century ; 
that some of the persons thus intombed were the immediate forefathers 
of the existing generation; and that the reason they used these stone 
implements was that they had neither bronze nor iron. In the part of the 
world they inhabit, there are no means of inventing bronze and no chance of 
finding iron ; so that the Esquimaux, from time out of memory, have been forced 
to use stone implements. In fact, in many places they have no wood, and 
in the Northumberland Straits, where they have to go very far to find wood, 
it is a great kindness to give them the oar of a boat, or any other piece of 
timber, out of which they can make arrow-stems. They are so hard up for 
wood, and so little drift wood is found in some parts of Smith’s Sound, that the 
Esquimaux there, when they have shot a reindeer, or any other animal, witli 
one of their wooden arrows, will piek out any broken pieces of the arrow 
and splice them to the other part of the shaft. I have merely men- 
tioned this to show that at the present day when we in England, after nearly 
six thousand years of man’s existence, are making use of mixtures of all 
kinds of metals, there is existing in another part of the globe a race of human 
beings who have actually within the last few years been using nothing but 
stone, and they, too, a people not at all devoid of intelligence. The Esquimaux 
are men of the highest type of barbarous intelligence, — if I may use such a 
phrase, — men who, if they had had the opportunities of inventing bronze, would 
have done it, and who, had there been iron to be found in their country, would 
have made use of it. The only iron they have found in the country is a sort 
of iron-stone, which they use to strike fire with. They travel long distances 
to get at the mines where the iron stone is found, and, when they have got it, 
strike two pieces together so as to obtain a light, which they apply to the 
Greenland moss forming wicks, which they float in the oil of the seal, &c. 
I think these facts are sufficient to show that we need not go so very far 
back to prove that there has been a Stone age, — that the Stone age is not so 
