and Western Europe, as well as in Italy, and Spain, but never in the more northerly parts of Europe, that is to say in Denmark, Scotland, Sweden, or Norway, or beyond a certain line in the north of England.

It will not affect my argument whether we call these primitive cave-men palæolithic or neolithic; we never find their traces in the North of Europe. We find neither the implements which characterise the lower beds of the caves of Périgord, or Belgium, or England, nor the bones of the extinct animals—I mean the mammoth, the rhinoceros, the cave-bear, the cave-hyena, the musk-ox, &c. Why is this? I must give the same reason that I gave in the other case-both man and brute were kept out by the ice. The climate in the North did not permit the cave-men of the Mammoth-or, if it is preferred, the Reindeer-epoch to advance. The ice still lingered in Denmark and Scotland. When did it retire? It retired, as is evidenced by the most ancient relics found in these countries, in the Polished Stone Age. And we arrive at precisely the same conclusion which we reached before.

In the caves of the so-called Paleolithic Age no polished stone implements are ever found, and as archæologists use the terms neolithic and polished

buted fragments from thin seams of brown and striped jaspers, and black, yellowish, and grey flints, and not unfrequently nodules of chalcedony and agate. Some of the plains are thickly strewn with these splintered stones. Some of these specimens Prof. Leidy pronounces to be unquestionably "rude implements of art;" while, as he remarks, "the vast numbers of similar stones to be found on the plains and buttes near Fort Bridger, and their gradation to undoubted accidental fragments with which they are mingled, alone renders it improbable that they should be considered as such." The learned professor figures a number of the specimens, which bear a strong resemblance to the paleolithic types.

If

It is very evident from these facts that the great bulk of these fractured stones-flint, chert, quartzite, argillite, jasper (all with the exception of argillite, varying forms of quartz, or pure silica)-are of non-artificial origin, and the presumption, to say the least, is very strong that all are so. nature can produce the chippings (as is unquestionable) which appear on the flint and argillite nodules, where is the process to stop? If she can produce a specimen that is so much like the so-called artificial specimen that it can hardly be distinguished from it, why may she not have originated both specimens ?

I will add only one other remark. It is well known that flints, believed by many archeologists from their artificial appearance to have been shaped by the hand of man, have been found in Pliocene and Miocene deposits, as, for example, in the Pliocene strata of the valley of the Tiber, and in the Miocene strata near Pontlevoy, in France. Now these flints, if their stratigraphical position is correctly described, are undoubtedly non-artificial, and if so, the quaternary flints of the Drift gravels are also probably nonartificial.

I present these considerations as an argument going to show that Mr. Callard is correct in his views on this point, but I doubt if they will appear conclusive to all minds; they are certainly not so regarded by archeologists like Mr. Evans and Mr. Boyd Dawkins, and for the present we must be content to await additional light on the subject. They open up a most interesting line of investigation, which I trust will be followed up by such competent observers as Mr. Callard.

stone as interchangeable and equivalent to one another, I object to the application of the term "neolithic" to this period. When we descend to a later period that of the Lake-Dwellings-we encounter at once the polished implements, as we do in the peat-bogs of Denmark and in the carses of Scotland.

The faunas, too, in the two cases are entirely different in the oldest bonecaves of France, England, Germany, the fauna consists of the mammoth, the rhinoceros tichorinus, the cave-lion, the cave-bear, the reindeer, the musk-o the urus, the aurochs, the horse, &c.; in Denmark, and Scotland, and Sweden, the fauna associated with the earliest remains of man consists of urus, aurochs, red-deer, brown bear, sheep, tame-ox, wild boar, fox, dog, &c., the same as the fauna which occurs in the peat of the Somme Valley and in the Swiss lake-dwellings.*

:

It may be said that the bones of the mammoth have been found in Scotland this is true; but they have been found in the Glacial formation denominated the till, showing that the animal penetrated into this region in the midst of the Ice Age-wandered off occasionally, no doubt, from the more genial regions farther south, where he existed at that time as the contemporary of man. It was probably only an occasional straggler that crossed this inhospitable line; and it is possible, as I intimated in my paper, that man may have done the same thing. But this was the exception, not the rule; all that I meant to insist on was, that in general the ice and the snow in these northerly regions constituted a barrier to the men and to the animals who left their remains in such caverns as Moustier, La Madelaine, Chaleux, Kent's Hole, and the Kesslerloch, and to point out that we find that barrier removed in the Polished Stone Age.

Mr. Callard remarks that he would hesitate to believe that the paleolithic flood can have been as recent as I represent it, because that flood must have occurred at a time when the Straits of Dover were not in existence. I am

not sure that the paleolithic flood was not subsequent to the formation of these straits, but, waiving this, I would observe that an elevation of the seabottom some 150 feet would unite England with France at this point; and I would farther call attention to the fact that the dwarfish shells of the mussel, cockle, and other marine species, occur on a raised beach at Upsala, in Sweden, 100 feet above the sea; and at Linde, 130 miles west of Stockholm, they are found at a height of 230 feet above the sea. The significance of this fact is this, that these shells were deposited in their present positions since the date of the Danish shell-mounds, where the marine shells are much larger. The mussel, and the other species represented in the Kjökkenmöddings, were much larger than they occur now in the waters of the Baltic, because these waters were at that time much more salt than they have been since the broad channel was closed which formerly connected

* The remains of the reindeer are found occasionally in the peat-bogs and in neolithic caves, but it is a rare occurrence; during the "Reindeeer epoch the animal seems to have abounded all over Central and Western Europe.

the North Sea with the Baltic along the line of the lakes Malar, Hjelmar and Wenern. Those straits were open when the Danish fishermen occupied the sites of the shell-mounds, and the date of these shell-heaps is proved by the fauna to be fully as recent as that of the lake-dwellings. Indeed, in one of the oldest of them (near Kallundborg) objects of bronze have been found. Since this date-which was hardly more than 3,000 years ago-the straits referred to have been closed, and the land at Linde, in Sweden, has risen 230 feet.

I may add, that the coasts of Norway have risen 600 feet since the temperature of the adjacent seas was very nearly what it is to-day.

If these changes have occurred within so recent a period, why should there be any difficulty about the Straits of Dover? The elevation of the land at Linde must have occurred since bronze implements found their way to Denmark-that is to say, within 3,000 or 3,500 years.

:

ORDINARY MEETING, JANUARY 20, 1879.

THE REV. R. THORNTON, D.D., VICE-PRESIDENT, IN THE CHAIR.

The minutes of the last meeting were read and confirmed, and the follow ing elections were announced :—

MEMBER :-W. H. Anderson, Esq., C.E., Ceylon.

ASSOCIATE:-Rev. H. Brass, M.A., F.G.S., Red Hill.

The following paper was then read by the author:

FINAL CAUSE; a Critique of the Failure of Paley and the Fallacy of Hume. By JOSEPH P. THOMPSON, D.D.,LL.D., of Berlin.

IN

N his "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century," Mr. Leslie Stephen pays an earnest and impartial tribute to the two writers of that period, who were the foremost disputants upon the doctrine of a final cause in Nature as proving the existence of God,David Hume and William Paley. Of Hume he says: "We have in his pages the ultimate expression of the acutest scepticism of the eighteenth century, the one articulate statement of a philosophical judgment upon the central questions at issue."* And again :-"Hume's scepticism completes the critical movement of Locke. It marks one of the great turning-points in the history of thought. From

* Chap. vi. sec. 3.

his writings we may date the definite abandonment of the philosophical conceptions of the preceding century, leading, in some cases, to an abandonment of the great questions as insoluble; and, in others, to an attempt to solve them by a new method. Hume did not destroy ontology or theology, but he destroyed the old ontology; and all later thinkers, who have not been content with the mere dead bones of extinct philosophy, have built up their systems upon entirely new lines."*

Of Paley Mr. Stephen says:-"The Natural Theology lays. the basis of his whole system. The book, whatever its philosophical shortcomings, is a marvel of skilful statement. It states, with admirable clearness and in a most attractive form, the argument which has the greatest popular force, and which, duly etherealized, still passes muster with metaphysicians. Considered as the work of a man who had to cram himself for the purpose, it would be difficult to praise its literary merits. too highly. The only fault in the book, considered as an instrument of persuasion, is that it is too conclusive. If there were no hidden flaw in the reasoning, it would be impossible to understand, not only how any should resist, but how any one should ever have overlooked the demonstration.” †

دو

In the history of polemics there is hardly another instance of such collapse of popularity as has befallen the book, the style and method of which Mr. Stephen has here so justly praised. The argument of Paley was regarded by theologians of his time as invincible; and his illustrations from Nature were so attractive to youth that his "Natural Theology was adopted as a text-book in colleges. Upon the basis of his famous axiom was built up the series of " Bridgewater Treatises," in which anatomy and physiology, astronomy, geology, and various branches of physics were brought to illustrate and establish the evidence of design in Nature. So keen a logician as Archbishop Whately used his acumen to adapt Paley's reasoning to the later discoveries and developments of science; and so careful a physicist as Dr.Whewell led his "Induction of the Physical Sciences" up to the same. conclusion. Yet to the present generation, within less than eighty years from its first appearance, Paley's "Natural Theology" is already antiquated as to its once brilliant and conclusive demonstrations, and as an authority is well-nigh obsolete.

Quite otherwise has been the fate of Hume. Mr. Stephen

* Chap. iii. sec. 43.

† Chap. viii. iv. 38.