Page:Antiquity of Man as Deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton.djvu/30

24 Toul," given by Prof, de Quatrefages in the previously cited work, fig. 36, p. 62.

The skull which Dr. Davis figures, p. 10, op. cit., was a recent specimen obtained from the phrenological collection of M. Deville. "There is no reason for thinking that it is any more than a calvarium of a modern Englishman" (ib. p. 4). M. de Quatrefages concurs with Dr. Davis and repeats the figure in the same page of the work in which the Bishop’s skull is represented.

These are exceptions to the cranial outline in the educated humanity of the actual or recent period, whilst the "Tilbury skull" may accord with the rule in the Palæolithic range of time. But the bimanal characters of the skeleton are distinct from quadrumanal ones in the earliest, as in the latest and highest, races of mankind.

The sections of the strata on the west bank of the Thames-tributary from the Lea valley, and on the north banks of the Thames itself, down to and beyond Tilbury, from which strata flint implements of the ruder kinds have been derived, lead me to conclude that the man whose bones have been discovered in the ninth well-defined stratum beneath the actual surface of the present Thames bank may have availed himself of like tools for combat, defence, and slaughter of the animals affording the chief supply of his sustenance, and may have belonged to one of the older tribes who lived on the river-margins and left the evidences of their abodes on the north, now Essex, side above cited.

The only evidence of a resort to flint for a tool or weapon, discovered in the course of the Dock-excavations, is a nodule showing fractures at portions broken oft by some violence,