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Primeval Man in the Valley of the Lea. 
at this time accurately define his mental and bodily outline. 
At times there is a slight flicker of new light—too often, it 
must be confessed, a light that speedily dies out, or is proved 
to be delusive. New facts about primaeval man come in very 
slowly, but the time will one day certainly arrive when we 
shall be able to place his bones together. In times like these 
it is necessary to remember that we require nothing but facts 
—we want the truth. No idle fancies, or highly coloured or 
erroneous statements, are wanted. Palaeolithic man has quite 
recently been described in a popular scientific periodical as 
a low-browed, flat-headed, dog-jawed, black-skinned, hog- 
tusked, short-legged savage, worse in type than the lowest 
savage of the present day—in other words, an animal more 
repulsive than a baboon. The same writer instructed us 
that, after the river-drift and cave implements were made, 
Northern Europe was submerged for many hundred feet under 
the sea and then came up again. These statements regarding 
the men are sensational libels, having no foundation in fact. 
I admit that we may have had a demon-like progenitor of 
the baboon class in the long past, hut that was long before 
the time of the men of the river-gravels, and vastly longer 
before the time of the skilful and artistic Palaeolithic cave- 
dwellers. No doubt the river-drift men were different from 
the men of modern times; probably they differed somewhat 
in colour, form, and hairiness; but as modern Elephants, 
Lions, Hyaenas, Horses, and other beasts do not enormously 
differ in form and character from the allied animals of the 
river-gravels, why should modern man differ from the river- 
drift man in an enormous degree ? 
It need hardly be said that the river-drift men had no 
written language; they lived a very long time before any 
cup-marking or ogham lines and notches were thought of; 
yet these men must have had some means of expressing 
their passions and thoughts, chiefly, perhaps, by a few 
partially-articulate sounds and significant gestures. 
Primaeval man lived in vast numbers on the banks of the 
Lea; he also certainly lived in South Essex on the northern 
banks of the Thames, and, as I have shown, in the Talley of 
