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these cases must be abandoned, while as to the rest, they are by no means to be relied on; in fact, as the evidence now stands, the careful geologist does not recognize any traces of the existence of man prior to the close of the quaternary period. As the glacial epoch died away, man appeared, and his relics are found in the ancient gravel-beds of the rivervalleys of Europe and India, and in the bone-caves of Europe, associated in both cases with the bones of extinct animals, such as the mammoth, rhinoceros tichorinus, reindeer, &c. Since these gravels were deposited in their present position, most of the peat-beds of Europe have been formed, and great changes have taken place in the physical geography of the country. These facts, and the great mass of gravel and loess under which the flint axes are buried, give the appearance of great antiquity to these relics, and have created the present prevailing belief in the vast antiquity of the human race. My own opinion is, after bestowing a great deal of attention upon these phenomena, that they can all be explained in accordance with the recent appearance of man in Europe; but in the present paper I do not propose to go into the subject, save for the purpose of calling attention to a single point. It is admitted that the cave-earth and the river-gravel are post-glacial, and that they were deposited just after the formation of the boulder-clay and the retirement of the ice from the regions which were affected by the glacial influences. If, therefore, we can find any clue to the date of the glacial epoch, we can fix approximately the date of man's appearance in Northern and Central Europe. Various attempts have been made to fix the date of the ice age by calculations based on the depth, and rate of deposit, of the quaternary alluvions, and the rate of recession of the great cataracts of the Niagara and the Mississippi. MM. De Ferry and Arcelin have made such a calculation from the relics of the iron, the bronze, and the stone age, found in the alluvial deposits of the valley of the Saône. By independent observations both of these distinguished archaeologists ascertained (as they believed) that the relics of the paleolithic age found in this valley are some 6,000 or 8,000 years old. M. René Kerviler has made similar observations at the mouth of the Loire, and arrived at about the same result. In America, Professor N. H. Winchell has calculated the rate of recession of the falls of St. Anthony, on the Upper Mississippi, and estimates that these falls have been from 6,000 to 8,000 years in cutting their way back from Fort Snelling, where the cataract was first formed at the close of the "second" glacial epoch.

2. The most satisfactory observations of this character have, however, been made by Professor Edmund Andrews on the ancient beaches of Lakes Huron and Michigan, in the United States, which were formed after the close of the glacial epoch. This calculation was based on the recession of the bluffs on the lake-shore, and on the amount of the sand thus washed away by the waves on the north, and deposited at the southern extremity or head of the lake. Dr. Andrews made a calculation based on each of these data, and the result was about the same in both cases, which was, that the total time required for the formation of all the beaches (including the present) has been from 5,290 to 7,490 years.

3. It is, not, however, to any of these calculations that I propose to call the attention of this Society at present; to my own mind there is a simpler and more convincing method of solving this question than any of these, with regard to all of which there may be, in a greater or less degree, a residuum of scepticism arising from a want of implicit confidence in the accuracy of the observations.

4. I propose to fix approximately the date of the glacial epoch without going into any calculations of this kind, but resting the determination on one single, well-ascertained fact, and I believe I can do so to the entire satisfaction of every impartial and unbiassed mind which will lend its attention to the subject.

5. Before proceeding to elucidate the point I have in view, I may mention that the peat formations of Europe present a strong presumptive argument for the recent date of the gravel deposits of the river valleys in which the palaeolithic remains are found. This peat is superimposed directly on the gravels, and no doubt commenced to form immediately on-or very soon after the subsidence of the waters which deposited the loess and gravels which are found high up on the slopes of the valleys. The age of this peat will probably give us the time which has elapsed since the palaeolithic age. At the bottom of the peat and silt formations of the Somme valley, M. Boucher de Perthes found the traces of a pile-dwelling, resting immediately on the gravels. The "lake-dwellers" had succeeded the cave-folk of the paleolithic epoch. There is no geological formation to indicate any interval between the twc ́ periods, although it is by no means unreasonable to suppose that a brief interval-possibly a few centuries-had passed. The relics found at the bottom of the peat are none of them more ancient than the neolithic age. Much of the peat of Europe we know to be no older than the Roman period.

Objects of metal have been often found in the French and Irish peat at great depths, and at Abbeville, as we are told by Sir C. Lyell, a boat loaded with Roman bricks was found in the lowest tier of the peat. The erect stumps of the beech, three or four feet high, are frequently met with also in the peat-beds of the Somme valley, showing that they had formed with sufficient rapidity to cover up these stumps before they had time to decay. Now, the stumps of the beech, exposed. in a damp situation, are especially perishable, and will not stand without decay more than fifty years. Even the stumps. of the oak will not last under such circumstances more than one hundred years. The peat, therefore, at Abbeville, must, in some cases, have formed at the rate of three feet in fifty years, or six feet in a century. This may, however, have been under peculiarly favourable conditions, and much of it may have formed more slowly. At the rate of one foot in a century, as the depth in some places is thirty feet, it may all have been formed in 3,000 years-and I doubt if it is older than this.

6. M. Belgrand has pointed out that none of the peat could have been formed during the prevalence of the paleolithic floods, which, he remarks, were extremely violent, and when, he says, the amount of rainfall was so great, that it rolled on the surface of the most permeable soils. M. Belgrand assigns as a reason why the peat could not have formed during the paleolithic epoch, that it never grows in muddy, turbid water; and, he adds, that this fact proves further, that the change from the large rivers of the paleolithic age to the small rivers of the neolithic age, must have taken place suddenly. If, he observes, the change had been a gradual one, the valleys would have been filled, not with peat, but with gravel, sand, and alluvium. There is no peat in the valley of the Marne, because, owing to the impermeable nature of a part of its course, it is subject to violent floods of muddy water. So the Seine valley, down to Montereau, contains much peat, but below this point, where it is joined by the Yonne, no peat occurs, because the Yonne, like the Marne, receives its waters from an impermeable district, and is subject to similar floods of muddy water (Le Bassin Parisien aux ages anté-historiques). 7. If M. Belgrand is correct,-and Professor Busk states that he has enjoyed unusual opportunities for studying this subject, the transition from the palaeolithic to the neolithic age must have been abrupt, and we must decline to accept the common theory, that there was a great hiatus or gap between these periods.

8. The opinion that a great interval was interposed between the first and second stone ages was based on the alleged change of climate, as evidenced by the presence of such animals as the reindeer in the paleolithic caves and gravels, on the disappearance of such animals as the reindeer, the cave-bear, the cave-hyæna, &c., and the introduction of a new fauna, and on the changes which have occurred in the coast lines and the interior lines of drainage. But it is now admitted that the reindeer was found in Germany in the time of Cæsar (Cave Hunting, by Prof. Dawkins, p. 73); the cave-lion, cave-hyæna, and cave-bear are recognized as belonging to existing species; and it is well known that the coasts of Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have been elevated from 200 to 600 feet since the waters of the adjacent seas acquired their present milder temperature—that is, since the close of the glacial epoch, which (having said so much by way of preliminary about the peat), as I shall now proceed to show, corresponded in Scotland and Scandinavia with the inauguration of the neolithic age, and the elucidation of which point is the special aim which I have in view in the preparation of this paper.

9. If I can show that the glacial epoch came down to the date of Robenhausen and the Danish shell-mounds, I shall have brought that mysterious geological episode within the well-defined limits of chronology, and shall dispel the illusion of the 800,000 years given by Sir C. Lyell, in the tenth edition of his Principles, or the 200,000 years given in the last edition of that great work, as the date for the retirement of the ice sheet.

10. We are told by Sir C. Lyell and other writers on the subject that there are no traces of the paleolithic age in the North of Europe-that is to say, in the north of England, in Scotland, in Norway, Denmark, and Sweden. In these countries the earliest traces of man belong in every instance to the neolithic or polished stone age; nor, excepting a few cases in Scotland, and one or two in Ireland, have the remains of the mammoth or rhinoceros been found in these countries. We find thousands of stone implements of the second stone age, and innumerable bones of the fauna of the second stone age, but we never meet with any of the paleolithic tools and weapons, and only occasionally, in the Scotch glacial deposits, and in one or two of the caves of Ireland, with the remains of the great extinct animals. "It has been estimated," says Sir C. Lyell, that the number of flint implements of the paleolithic type already found in northern France and southern England, exclusive of flakes, is not less than 3,000. No

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similar tools have been met with in Denmark, Sweden, or Norway, where Nilsson, Thomsen, and other antiquaries have collected with so much care the relics of the stone age. Hence it is supposed that palæolithic man never penetrated into Scandinavia, which may, perhaps, have been as much covered with the ice and snow as the greater part of Greenland is at present." The same statement is repeated in Archiv für Anthropologie, where we read that "neither in Scandinavia nor in North Germany have we yet discovered the slightest trace of paleolithic man. Scandinavia and

North Germany were then covered by the ice" (Meeting of the Anthropological Society in Munich, 1874; Archiv, August, 1875; Correspondenz-Blatt, s. 18).

11. It is clear, therefore, that man was kept out of Scandinavia and Scotland by the ice; when he was permitted to advance, he advanced. When was this? We know by the character of the most ancient human implements found in these countries-in the famous peat-bogs of Denmark, for example,that it was in the polished stone age. The polished stone age had already set in when the ice retired from Denmark and Sweden, the north of England, and Scotland. Given the date of the polished stone age, and we have the date of the close of the glacial age.

12. The glacial conditions which excluded palæolithic man from the North, excluded him at the same time from Switzerland and the elevated portion of Carinthia, and from Styria. "The farther one recedes," says Count Wurmbrandt, "from the mass of the Alps, the greater is the chance of finding in the caverns traces of paleolithic man.”

13. It is the lake-dwellings, not the bone-caverns nor the implement-bearing gravels, that we find in the Swiss mountains. The men of the polished stone age settled at Robenhausen, and Wauwyl, and Meilen, at the same epoch that they crossed the Elbe into Denmark, and established themselves in the valleys of the Forth and the Clyde.

14. What was the date of the polished stone age? It corresponds with the date of the lake-dwellings, with the period of the shell-mounds, with the age of the older stone-graves, and with the earlier stages of the peat. Now, at one of the oldest of the Swiss lake-dwellings-Robenhausen-and that in the lower beds, we already encounter traces of bronze. At Wangen we find great quantities of corn, baked cakes of bread, flax, and perforated stone axes. At Wauwyl we find a glass bead; at Moosseedorf, remains of the dog, pig, sheep, goat, and cow; at Meilen, a bronze armilla and a bronze celt.

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