N bringing under review the state of our present knowledge with regard to the antiquity of man, probably no fitter place could be found for the discussion of such a topic than the adopted home of my venerated friend, Early Relics the late Sir Daniel Wil

of the Race son (President of Toronto University), who first introduced the word "prehistoric" into the English language. Some among us may be able to call to mind the excitement not only among men of science but among the general public, when, in 1859, the discoveries of M. Boucher de Perthes † and Dr. Rigollot in the gravels of the valley of the Somme, at Abbeville and Amiens, were confirmed by the investigations of the late Sir Joseph Prestwich, myself and others, and the co-existence of man with the extinct animals of the quaternary fauna, such as the mammoth and woollyhaired rhinoceros, was first virtually established. It was at the same time pointed out that these relics belonged to a far earlier date than the ordinary stone weapons found upon the surface, which usually showed signs of grinding or polishing, and that in fact there were two stone ages in Britain. To these the terms neolithic and paleolithic were subsequently applied by Sir John Lubbock.

The excitement was not less, when, at the meeting of this Association at Aberdeen in the autumn of that year, Sir Charles Lyell, in the presence of the

*The distinguished author of this article, Sir John Evans, K. C. B., D. C. L., is the successor of Lord Lister in the Presidency of the British Science Association, before which, at its meeting in Toronto, the paper was read. Its author is an eminent archæologist; and has published several works of note on "The Ancient Stone and Bronze Implements" of Great Britain. He has successively been President of the Geological Society, the Anthropological Institute, the Society of Antiquarians, and the Mumismatic Society of Britain. His antiquarian and numismatic collections are believed to be the finest in England. Sir John Evans is also the author of a work on "The Coins of the Ancient Britons."

† See article on Anthropology, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, Vol. II., p. 115.

Prince Consort, called attention to the discoveries in the valley of the Somme, the site of which he had himself visited, and to the vast lapse of time indicated by the position of the implements in drift-deposits a hundred feet above the existing river. existing river. The conclusions forced upon those who examined the facts on the spot did not receive immediate acceptance by all who were interested in geology and archæology, and fierce were the controversies on the subject that were carried on both in the newspapers and before various learned societies.

It is at the same time instructive and amusing to look back on the discussions of those days. While one class of objectors accounted for the configuration of the flint implements from the gravels by some unknown chemical agency, by the violent and continued gyratory action of water, by fracture resulting from pressure from rapid cooling when hot or by rapid heating when cold, or even regarded them as aberrant forms of fossil fishes, there were others who, when compelled to acknowledge that the implements were the work of men's hands, attempted to impugn and set aside the evidence as to the circumstances under which they had been discovered. In doing this they adopted the view that the worked flints had either been introduced into the containing beds at a comparatively recent date, or, if they actually formed constituent parts of the gravel, then that this was a mere modern alluvium resulting from floods at no very remote period.

so true a note that I am tempted to reproduce the paragraph to which I refer :"When speculations on the long series of events which occurred in the glacial and post-glacial periods are indulged in, the imagination is apt to take alarm at the immensity of the time required to interpret the monuments of these ages, all referable to the era of existing species. In order to abridge the number of centuries which would otherwise be indispensable, a disposition is shown by many to magnify the rate of change in prehistoric times by investing the causes which have modified the animate and inanimate world with extraordinary and excessive energy. It is related of a great Irish orator of our day that when he was about to contribute somewhat parsimoniously toward a public charity he was persuaded by a friend to make a more liberal donation. In doing so he apologized for his first apparent want of generosity by saying that his early life. had been a constant struggle with scanty means, and that they who are born to affluence cannot easily imagine how long a time it takes to get the chill of poverty out of one's bones.' In like manner we of the living generation, when called upon to make grants of thousands of centuries in order to explain the events of what is called the modern period, shrink naturally at first from making what seems so lavish an expenditure of past time. Throughout our early education we have been accustomed to such strict economy in all that relates to the chronology 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.'

The Cradle of

the Race

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 probabil

ity, 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 existence of man in pre-glacial pliocene, or even miocene times. Flint implements of ordinary paleolithic type have, for instance, been recorded as found in the . eastern counties of England in beds beneath the chalky boulder clay, but on careful examination the geological evidence has not to my mind proved satisfactory, nor has it, I believe, been generally accepted.

Early Traces

of Man

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 boulder clay, should have manufactured implements so identical in character that they cannot 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 forestbed 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 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 of the Leeds meeting of this Association in 1890, I dwelt 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. Eugene 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.

The Paleolithic When we return to pal

Period

æolithic 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 instuments, and by building up the one upon the other the flakes struck off by the primeval workmen in those remote times we have been able to reconstruct the blocks of flint which served as his material. That the duration of the paleolithic 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 100 to 150 feet, have been eroded since the deposit of the earliest implement-bearing beds. Nor is the apparent duration of this period diminished by the consideration that the floods which hollowed out the valleys were not in all probability of such frequent occurrence as to teach the palæolithic man by experience the danger of settling too near to the streams, for had he kept to the higher slopes of the valley there would have been but little chance of his implements having so constantly formed constituent parts of the gravels deposited by the floods.

The CaveThe examination of BritDeposits ish cave-deposits affords corroborative evidence of this extended duration of the paleolithic period. In Kent's Cavern at Torquay, for instance, we find in the lowest deposit the breccia below the red cave-earth, implements of flint and chert corresponding in all respects with those of the high level and most ancient river gravels. In the caveearth these are scarcer, though implements occur which also have their analogues in the river deposits; but, what is more remarkable, harpoons of reindeer's horn and needles of bone are present, identical in form and character with those of the caverns of the reindeer period in the south of France, and suggestive of some bond of union or identity of descent between the early troglodytes, whose habitations were geographically so widely separated the one from the other.

In a cavern at Creswell Crags, on the confines of Derbyshire and Nottingham, a bone has moreover been found engraved with a representation of parts of a horse in precisely the same style as the_engraved bones of the French caves. It is uncertain whether any of the river-drift specimens belong to so late a date as these artistic cavern-remains; but the

greatly superior antiquity of even these to any neolithic relics is testified by the thick layer of stalagmite, which had been deposited in Kent's Cavern before its occupation by men of the neolithic and bronze periods.

Towards the close of the period covered by the human occupation of the French caves there seems to have been a dwindling in the number of the larger animals constituting the quaternary fauna, whereas their remains are present in abundance in the lower and, therefore, more recent of the valley gravels. This circumstance may afford an argument in favor of regarding the period represented by the later French caves as a continuation of that during which the old river gravels were deposited, and yet the great change in the fauna that has taken place since the latest of the cave-deposits included in the paleolithic period is indicative of an immense lapse of time.

How much greater must have been the time required for the more conspicuous change between the old quaternary fauna of the river gravels and that characteristic of the neolithic period!

The Neolithic Period

As has been pointed out by Prof. Boyd Dawkins, only 31 out of 48 well-ascertained species living in the post-glacial or river-drift period survived into pre-historic or neolithic times. We have not, indeed, any means at command for estimating the number of centuries which such an important change indicates; but when we remember that the date of the commencement of the neolithic or surface stone period is still shrouded in the mist of a dim antiquity, and that prior to that commencement the river-drift period had long come to an end; and when we further take into account the almost inconceivable ages that even under the most favorable conditions the excavation of wide and deep valleys by river action implies, the remoteness of the date at which the palæolithic period had its beginning almost transcends our powers of imagi

nation.

We find distinct traces of river action from 100 to 200 feet above the level of existing streams and rivers, and sometimes at a great distance from them; we observe old fresh-water deposits on the slopes of valleys several miles in width; we find that long and lofty escarpments

of rock have receded unknown distances since their summits were first occupied by paleolithic man; we see that the whole side of a wide river valley has been carried away by an invasion of the sea, which attacked and removed a barrier of chalk cliffs from 400 to 600 feet in height; we find that what was formerly an inland river has been widened out into an arm of the sea, now the highway of our fleets, and that gravels which were originally deposited in the bed of some ancient river now cap isolated and lofty hills.

British Remains Geologically Recent

And yet, remote as the date of the first known occupation of Britain by man may be, it belongs to what, geologically speaking, must be regarded as a quite recent period, for we are now in a position to fix with some degree of accuracy its place on the geological scale. Thanks to investigations ably carried out at Hoxne in Suffolk, and at Hitchin in Hertfordshire, by Mr. Clement Reid, under the auspices of this association, and of the Royal Society, we know that the implement-bearing beds of those places undoubtedly belong to a time subsequent to the deposit of the great chalky boulder clay of the eastern counties of England. It is, of course, self evident that this vast deposit, in whatever manner it may have been formed, could not, for centuries after its deposition was complete, have presented a surface inhabitable by man. Moreover, at a distance but little farther north beds exist which also, though at a somewhat later date, were apparently formed under glacial conditions. At Hoxne, the interval between the deposit of the boulder clay and of the implement-bearing beds is distinctly proved to have witnessed at least two noteworthy changes in climate. The beds immediately reposing on the clay are characterized by the presence of alder in abundance, of hazel and yew, as well as by that of numerous flowering plants indicative of a temperate climate very different from that under which the boulder clay itself was formed. Above these beds characterized by temperate plants comes a thick and more recent series of strata, in which leaves of the dwarf arctic willow and birch abound, and which were in all probability deposited under conditions

like those of the cold regions of Siberia and North America. At a higher level and of more recent date than these from which they are entirely distinct are the beds containing palæolithic implements formed in all probability under conditions not essentially different from those of the present day. However this may be, we have now conclusive evidence that the palæolithic implements are, in the eastern counties of England, of a date long posterior to that of the great chalky boulder clay.

Paleolithic Depos- It may be said, and said its in Britain truly, that the imple

ments at Hoxne cannot be shown to belong to the beginning rather than to some later stage of the palæolithic period. The changes, however, that have taken place at Hoxne in the surface configuration of the country prove that the beds containing the implements cannot belong to the close of that period. It must, moreover, be remembered that in what are probably the earliest of the palæolithic deposits of the eastern counties those at the highest level, near Brandon, in Norfolk, where the gravels contain the largest proportion of pebbles derived from glacial beds, some of the implements themselves have been manufactured from materials not native to the spot but brought from a distance, and derived in all probability either from the boulder clay or from some of the beds associated with it.

Our Asiatic

Ancestors

We must, however, take a wider view of the whole question, for it must not for a moment be supposed that there are the slightest grounds for believing that the civilization, such as it was, of the paleolithic period originated in the British Isles. We find in other countries implements so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands. These occur over large areas in France under similar conditions to those that prevail in England. The same forms have been discovered in the ancient river gravels of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Some few have been recorded from the north of Africa, and analogous types occur in considerable numbers in the south of that continent. On the banks of the Nile, many hundreds of feet above

its present level, implements of the European types have been discovered, while in Somaliland, in an ancient river valley at a great elevation above the sea, Mr. Seton-Karr has collected a large number of implements formed of flint and quartzite which, judging from their form and character, might have been dug out of the drift deposits of the Somme or the Seine, the Thames or the ancient Solent.

In the valley of the Euphrates implements of the same kind have also been found, and again farther east in the lateritic deposits of southern India they have been obtained in considerable numbers. It is not a little remarkable, and is at the same time highly suggestive, that a form of implement almost peculiar to Madras re-appears among implements from the very ancient gravels of the Manzanares at Madrid. In the case of the African discoveries we have as yet no definite paleontological evidence by which to fix their antiquity, but in the Narbada Valley of Western India palæolithic implements of quartzite seem to be associated with a local fauna of pleistocene age, comprising, like that of Europe, the elephant, hippopotamus, ox, and other mammals of species now extinct. A correlation of the two faunas with a view of ascertaining their chronological relations is beset with many difficulties, but there seems reason for accepting this Indian pleistocene fauna as in some degree more ancient than the European.

The Early

History of the
Human Family

Is this not a case in which the imagination may be fairly invoked in aid of science? May we not from these data attempt in some degree to build up and reconstruct the early history of the human family? There, in Eastern Asia, in a tropical climate, with the means of subsistence readily at hand, may we not picture to ourselves our earliest ancestors gradually developing from a lowly origin, acquiring a taste for hunting, if not indeed being driven to protect themselves from the beasts around them, and evolving the more complicated forms of tools or weapons from the simpler flakes which had previously served them as knives? May we not imagine that, when once the stage of civilization denoted by these palæolithic implements had been reached, the game for the hunter became scarcer,