51 
of the flakes 'we see might be thus produced ; but it is, I confess, difficult to 
understand how the pieces of stone now on the table were thus formed into a 
shape which is so exactly like that which some of the recognised and authenti- 
cated implements of man have assumed. If the author will give us some 
notion of what forces of nature produce this peculiar form in the stones before 
us — whether it has been the frost and the sun in alternations of heat and cold ; 
surface action; or whether vertical or lateral pressure; he will remove a 
difficulty I have never yet been able quite to overcome. With reference to the 
Stone age continuing to the present time, I may say that the fact which has 
been stated is not peculiar to the Esquimaux, and that, if you were to look 
into the condition of some of the tribes of Australia, you would find almost 
the same thing at the present day. Whether they use stone or split flint I do 
not know, but some of them are so savage and barbarous as not even to know 
the uses of iron or bronze, and not even to have invented the use of the bow 
and arrow. I shall be glad if the reader of the paper will give some informa- 
tion in reply to the question I have asked. 
Capt. E. Petkie. — Sir Joseph Eayrer has alluded to the fact that the 
natives of Australia, not knowing the uses of iron or bronze, adopt stone 
implements. I can state it as a fact that until recently the natives of the 
neighbouring Pacific Islands did so. When at Sydney, twenty years ago, I 
remember that the men-of-war coming from the Pacific used to bring many of 
these stone implements, which had been obtained from the natives at some 
of the islands ; now, however, with the spread of European civilisation we 
cannot get any more implements from them : their “ iron age ” has set in ! 
Mr. H. Michele Whitley. — With reference to the human bone from the 
Victoria Cavern, referred to near the end of the paper, a letter has been 
published by Professor Boyd Dawkins in Nature of the 24tli of March, 
1880, and in it the Professor says : — 
“ I must adhere to my decision not to play the part of Secutor any further 
to a glacial Betiarius in the arena of Nature. If his net be strong enough to 
carry the upper Pleiocene and the Pleistocene mammalia of Europe, as well 
Palaeolithic man and the Neolithic skull of Olmo, I wish him joy of them. 
If, further, he will kindly give me the proof that the mammalia of Auvergne, 
considered upper Pleiocene by Falconer, Gaudry, Gervais, and other leading 
palaeontologists, are, as he terms them, ‘ a hash-up,’ they shall be properly 
served and iced, if necessary, in my second edition. 
“ I feel, however, that it is only right for me to notice the new gladiator who 
springs to the aid of his friend. The antiquity of man in the Victoria Cave 
is solely due, as it appears to me, to the perfervidum ingenkm ij. speak in all 
respect) of Mr. Tiddeman. It was first based on a fragment of fibula which 
ultimately turned out to belong to a bear. Then it was shifted to the cuts on 
two small bones, which were exhibited and discussed at the British Associa- 
tion, at the Anthropological Institute, and at the Geological Society of London. 
The bones are recent, and belong to sheep or goat, two domestic animals intro- 
duced into Britain in the Neolithic age. The cuts have been probably made 
by a metallic edge. Numerous bones of the same animals, in the same con- 
dition, and hacked in the same way, occurred in the Bomano-British refuse- 
heap on the top of the clay, and frequently slipped down over the working 
E 2 
