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Rh reasoning that the Canstadt skull had ever been adopted as a racial type, although the probability of its being a genuine Palæolithic fossil is now stronger than formerly. The facts of its discovery are as follows :—

In the year 1700, the then Duke of Wurtemburg excavated a Roman oppidum in the neighbourhood of Stuttgart, in the course of which a large quantity of bones, including those of Quaternary animals, were dug up and preserved in the duke's museum. A hundred years later a human jaw was found among these bones, and on this discovery being brought under the notice of Cuvier, he declined to regard it as of any value owing to the entire absence of information as to its position in the earth.

In 1855 Mr Jaeger found in the same collection a portion of a human cranial vault, and brought this fact forward as an argument in favour of the coexistence of man with the extinct mammals.

Smeermass Jaw.

Sir Charles Lyell accepted many of the speculations founded on this kind of evidence. Nor is it alone on such grounds that his accuracy has been called in question. A human jaw found by Professor Crahay, near Maestricht, and known as the "Smeermass machoire," was described by Lyell as coeval with a mammoth tusk disinterred "six yards removed from the human jaw in horizontal distance." Now, however, it is proved that the tusk was 24 feet deeper than the skull, and that the latter was merely a relic from a crannog of the Neolithic age, since discovered and investigated. An epitome of the evidence on which this prosaic conclusion has been arrived at will be found in my work on the Lake-dwellings of Europe, pp. 305-6.

Moulin-Quignon Jaw.

The difficulty of coming to a decision about discoveries of this kind is sometimes very embarrassing. Thus, in the case of the notorious Moulin-Quignon jaw, the "controversy reached such a climax that the disputants arranged to hold an international congress of representative men to inquire into the whole circumstances. Accordingly, this congress was opened in Paris on 9th May 1863. France was represented by MM. Lartet,