Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/113

Rh large shark, the sawn rib of a manatee, and a beaming full face carved on the shell of a pectunculus!

In an address to the Anthropological Section at the Leeds meeting of this association in 1890 I dealt somewhat fully with these supposed discoveries of the remains of human art in beds of Tertiary date; and I need not here go further into the question. Suffice it to say that I see no reason why the verdict of "not proven," at which I then arrived, should be reversed. In the case of a more recent discovery in upper Burma in beds at first pronounced to be upper Miocene, but subsequently "definitely ascertained to be Pliocene," some of the flints are of purely natural and not artificial origin, so that two questions arise: First, were the fossil remains associated with the worked flints or with those of natural forms? and second, were they actually found in the bed to which they have been assigned, or did they merely lie together on the surface? Even the Pithecanthropus erectus of Dr. Eugène Dubois from Java meets with some incredulous objectors from both the physiological and the geological sides. From the point of view of the latter the difficulty lies in determining the exact age of what are apparently alluvial beds in the bottom of a river valley.

When we return to palæolithic man it is satisfactory to feel that we are treading on comparatively secure ground, and that the discoveries of the last forty years in Britain alone enable us to a great extent to reconstitute his history. We may not know the exact geological period when first he settled in the British area, but we have good evidence that he occupied it at a time when the configuration of the surface was entirely different from what it is at present, when the river valleys had not been cut down to anything like their existing depth, when the fauna of the country was of a totally different character from that of the present day, when the extension of the southern part of the island seaward was in places such that the land was continuous with that of the continent, and when in all probability a far more rainy climate prevailed. We have proofs of the occupation of the country by man during the long lapse of time that was necessary for the excavation of the river valleys. We have found the old floors on which his habitations were fixed, we have been able to trace him at work on the manufacture of flint instruments, and by building up the one upon the other the flakes struck off by the primeval workman in those remote times we have been able to reconstruct the blocks of flint which served as his material. That the duration of the palæolithic period must have extended over an almost incredible length of time is sufficiently proved by the fact that valleys, some miles in width and of a depth of from one hundred to one hundred and fifty feet, have been eroded since