Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/112

100 of the earth and its inhabitants in remote ages, so fettered have we been by old traditional beliefs, that even when our reason is convinced and we are persuaded that we ought to make more liberal grants of time to the geologist, we feel how hard it is to get the chill of poverty out. of our bones." Many, however, have at the present day got over this feeling, and of late years the general tendency of those engaged upon the question of the antiquity of the human race has been in the direction of seeking for evidence by which the existence of man upon the earth could be carried back to a date earlier than that of the Quaternary gravels. There is little doubt that such evidence will eventually be forthcoming, but, judging from all probability, it is not in northern Europe that the cradle of the human race will eventually be discovered, but in some part of the world more favored by a tropical climate, where abundant means of subsistence could be procured, and where the necessity for warm clothing did not exist. Before entering into speculations on this subject, or attempting to lay down the limits within which we may safely accept recent discoveries as firmly established, it will be well to glance at some of the cases in which implements are stated to have been found under circumstances which raise a presumption of the existing of man in Pre-glacial, Pliocene, or even Miocene times.

Flint implements of ordinary palæolithic type have, for instance, been recorded as found in the eastern counties of England in beds beneath the chalky bowlder clay; but on careful examination the geological evidence has not to my mind proved satisfactory, nor has it, I believe, been generally accepted. Moreover, the archæological difficulty that man, at two such remote epochs as the Pre-glacial and the Post-glacial, even if the term "glacial" be limited to the chalky bowlder clay, should have manufactured implements so identical in character that they can not be distinguished apart, seems to have been entirely ignored. Within the last few months we have had the report of worked flints having been discovered in the late Pliocene forest bed of Norfolk, but in that instance the signs of human workmanship upon the flints are by no means apparent to all observers. But such an antiquity as that of the forest bed is as nothing when compared with that which would be implied by the discoveries of the work of men's hands in the Pliocene and Miocene beds of England, France, Italy, and Portugal, which have been accepted by some geologists. There is one feature in these cases which has hardly received due attention, and that is the isolated character of the reputed discoveries. Had man, for instance, been present in Britain during the crag period, it would be strange indeed if the sole traces of his existence that he left were a perforated tooth of a