Page:Antiquity of Man as Deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton.djvu/24

18 few bones so small as human bones are ever found. Primæval men may have buried their dead, but if the bodies were left unburied hyænas and other animals would eat every scrap. Still the human pelvic bones are large and heavy enough for preservation; and no doubt the time will some day arrive when human bones will be found, and we shall be able to build up human skeletons of Palæolithic age" (p. 114).

The endeavour to fulfil the tool-describer's prevision has been a chief pleasure and encouragement of foregoing osteological descriptions and comparisons. "The day will come," Mr. Smith repeats, "when we shall know much more of Palæolithic men than we now know. At present we only know that such men once existed, and made weapons and tools of stone during long periods of time." "Up to the present time there has not been a fragment of man's bony fabric that can with positive certainty be referred to a man of the River-Drift (p. 142). "It must be understood that I do not refer to men of the Caves, but to the far older tribes who lived on the river-margins and others who lived before the present rivers flowed."

To requests from non-geological friends for grounds of inference as to the period of time indicated by the successive strata overlying the human skeleton above described, I have replied by remarks—superfluous to experts much in the following terms:—

In the diagram exhibited at the Meeting of the Royal Society, December 6, 1883, the stratum marked "Sand" (Table of Strata, no. 9, facing p. 3), in which the remains were found, differs from what we understand as "sea-shore sand"; it is of a dark colour and of more powdery con-