Skeleton lately found at the Tilbury Docks, Essex. 148 
rude and polished implements, whose shape affords the chief 
evidence as to age; or, on the other, to divide human remains 
dating before and after a certain geological period, they are 
useful. But it must always be remembered that geological 
position furnishes the only absolute test of comparative age, 
and that to attempt to modify that test, where it exists, by 
appeals to other considerations is but to introduce confusion. 
The true importance of the Tilbury skeleton—to judge from 
the accounts at present available—lies in the fact that it is 
a skeleton of prehistoric man much resembling that of 
Neanderthal, so much discussed twenty years ago. And 
skeletons of prehistoric man are so extremely rare, and his 
flint implements so (comparatively) numerous, that we may 
well rejoice more over one skeleton than over many bushels 
of flint implements, which cannot tell us whether their users 
were as elegantly made as some of the South Sea Islanders, 
or as clumsy as the Eskimo. Whether our Tilbury man will 
give rise to as much discussion as the Neanderthal skeleton 
remains to be seen. But, supposing the likeness between the 
two to be as great as it is reported to be, 6 the Tilbury speci¬ 
men goes far to show that we have in each a normal type of 
prehistoric man, anci not—as some anatomists used to assert 
of the Neanderthal—utterly abnormal examples. For the 
probability, always of the slightest, that the Neanderthal 
skeleton is that of an extremely exceptional person, sinks 
almost to zero on the finding of another specimen of the same 
singular type at Tilbury, especially when we consider the 
extreme rarity of prehistoric human skeletons. And it is 
worth noting that the age of these two examples is probably 
not dissimilar. All that can be confidently stated as to the 
Tilbury man’s age is that he lived in the prehistoric era of 
Britain, many years before the embankment of the Thames 
during the Roman occupation. His skeleton having been 
found in the sand, below the inundation-mud, was no doubt 
deposited in the then channel of the river, at some point 
where the motion of the water was very slight. It is noticed 
6 Sir Richard Owen’s illustrations—published since the reading of this 
paper—show that the two skulls strikingly resemble each other. 
