Moulin Quinon and St. Acheul, and with them chipped flints, so chipped that M. Boucher de Perthes, the antiquarian, of Abbeville, and Dr. Rigollot, of Amiens, were convinced that they were the work of man, and if so, pointed to the contemporaneity of man with these extinct mammals. Whether these chipped flints are, indeed, the work of man, or whether the chipping is to be attributed to accidental fracture of the flint in the mêlée which brought them where they are found, is a question which it will not be necessary to enter upon now, as in Kent's Cavern the more palpable works of man, such as bone implements, are found associated with these extinct mammals.

But all questions respecting both the contemporaneity of man with the extinct mammalia, and also the age of man, appeared for a time as if they were going to be set at rest by the discovery of a cavern near Settle, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, nine hundred feet above the Ribble, in the limestone hill known as King's Scar. The cavern was discovered as far back as the day of her Majesty's coronation, from which circumstance it was named Victoria Cavern.

The early finds were those which more deeply interested the antiquarian. They consisted of fragments of pottery; of Roman coins of the reign of Trajan and Constantine; of spindle whorls. and beads; of bronze ornaments and ladies' brooches, the latter beautifully enamelled in red, blue, yellow, and green; they were delicate in workmanship, and of graceful design. The treasures pointed to the explanation that this cavern, away up on the bleak hills, had been a place of refuge to some RomanoCeltic families of the first few centuries of the Christian era.

More recent excavations in Victoria Cavern have shown that it had had in times still more remote, other occupants than Romano-Celts, for the workmen on digging below the first floor came upon another, thickly strewn with bones of a different character to those with which they had been familiar.

Amongst the bones, the osteologist found those of the hyena, grisly bear, hippopotamus, Bos primigenius, woolly rhinoceros, and the mammoth. And following this bone-bed beneath the clay to the outside of the cavern, a portion of a bone was discovered which presented some difficulty in its determination. It was therefore sent to London to Professor Busk, who at first considered it to be the fibula of a small elephant, with which decision the late Mr. James Flower (articulator of the College of Surgeons) agreed; but after some months Professor Busk gave it as his altered opinion that it was human, and read a paper upon the bone before the Anthropological Institute, and on another occasion referred to it as representing 66 one of the earliest extant speciraens of humanity.”

At the same time the clay under which the bone was discovered was decided by the explorer to be glacial clay.

If these two decisions had proved correct, the contemporaneity of man with the extinct mammals was put beyond question, and equally so the antiquity of the man to whom the bone belonged. It was not a flint implement this time, which might admit of some doubt, nor even a bone needle, but a supposed part of the man himself, that was now found with woolly rhinoceros and mammoth.

A report was read upon the subject by Mr. Tiddeman, at the British Association meeting at Belfast, in 1874; and from that time it was generally accepted as a settled truth that man had lived before the great Ice age in association with the extinct mammals whose remains were found in this bone-bed.

In the autumn of 1876 I visited the cavern in company with Mr. Jackson and a gentleman connected with the Leeds press. Mr. Jackson it was who commenced the exploration when the entrance to the cave was first discovered; he was also thoroughly acquainted with its subsequent working. We were indebted to his kindness for much valuable information.

The

One thing led me to doubt the glacier having deposited the clay after the bone in question had been left there, it was the laminated condition of the clay. The model on the table shows a section of the deposits at the entrance of the cavern. bone was at this spot (pointing to the model) with laminated clay both below and above it; and next you will observe two strata of stalagmite. The lamination appeared to me to imply an intermittent deposit, the result of a succession of wet and dry seasons, whilst the stalagmite gave evidence of other and greater dividing periods, a condition of things which I should not expect to find with glacial clay in situ.

At my suggestion our party of three climbed to the top of the limestone rock that overhung the entrance to the cavern, from which spot we saw that the hill sloped up full 300 feet more, and on this sloping plateau we found several stranded boulders that had travelled on the ice from other elevations. Where the boulders were, there, doubtless, the boulder clay had been; and I thought that I now saw the explanation of the laminated clay below.

If, instead of the glacier having left the boulder clay at the mouth of the cavern, the glacier had come up higher (which the boulders at the top proved that it did) and had deposited the clay upon the sloping plateau above, the winter rains disturbing the clay would carry in suspension portions of it from time to time over the precipice, which drying after the water subsided, would produce the laminae observed, and this would

have taken place exactly where the bone was found, which was not really in the cavern, but just at its entrance.

If this explanation is admitted, then the boulder clay is but remanié, and may have been deposited long after the glacier had ceased to move in the Ribble Valley. My firm conviction is that neither the bone in question, nor any of the other bones in this deposit are pre-glacial.

So much for the age of the bone, but now a word or two more about the bone itself. Prof. Boyd Dawkins, in his interesting book on Cave-hunting, p. 121, says "that the comparison of the bone with a specimen in the possession of Prof. Busk removed all doubt from his mind as to its having belonged to a man who was contemporary with the Cave Hyæna, and the other Pleistocene animals found in the cave.” And again, referring to the bone, he says, p. 411, "The man to whom it belonged was probably devoured by the hyenas who dragged into the den the Woolly Rhinoceros, Reindeer, and other creatures whose gnawed bones were strewn on the floor."

But Prof. Rupert Jones gave us a more minute description of the bone and of the relations of the man to whom it belonged. In a lecture on the Antiquity of Man, delivered April 26th, 1876, he says that the bone "is platycnemic in character, that is, it belonged to some sharp-shinned race, such as are found in the old deposits at Gibraltar, Central France, and North Wales."

And so the evidence appeared to stand until 11th April, 1877, when Prof. Dawkins, in concluding a paper before the Geological Society, with a candour quite characteristic, expressed his growing doubt about the human origin of the bone, and at a conference convened by the Anthropological Institute in the following month, to consider "the present state of the question of the Antiquity of Man," Prof. Dawkins then gave his reasons for believing that instead of the bone being human it was a portion of the fibula of a bear. The reasons were judged conclusive, for almost without exception the paleontologists then present were prepared to give it up. Prof. Busk rose to say,

respecting the bone, which he facetiously designated the bone of contention, that he "was perfectly open to be convinced that it might be ursine." And at the late meeting of the British Association at Dublin, a communication from Prof. Busk was read, in which he says, "I have received from Toulouse two ursine fibulæ of abnormal size, which in the part corresponding to the fragment of contention so closely resemble it as to leave little room for doubt that the latter is, or may be, in reality ursine, and not human; I am disposed, therefore, to acknowledge

that my diagnosis of the Victoria Cave bone was in all probability

The Committee with equal candour gave publicity to their decision that any argument based upon the bone's supposed character must be unreservedly given up.

I hold in my hand a human fibula, and have coloured that portion which corresponds to the fragment which has given rise to so much discussion. It is but six inches in length and without any articulation.

And here is another human fibula marked in a similar way. This one belonged to a man of large stature. You will observe how different the two are in form. Such a fragment of a bone so variable will leave it less a wonder that a mistake should have been made, than that there should have been the venture to determine a species from such a fragment.

We are left, then, where we were before, to argue the contemporaneity of man with the extinct mammalia from his handiwork, and not from the presence of any portion of his frame.

But the next and latest case of cavern exploration introduces a new feature into the argument.

On the estate of the Duke of Portland, at the north-east of Derbyshire, there is a beautiful 'dale known as Creswell Crags, where the shadows of the adjacent rocks, with their rich foliage, are reflected in the clear waters of an artificial lake that separates certain natural caverns in the limestone. Three of these caverns have lately been explored by the Rev. J. M. Mello, F.G.S.,-the Pinhole and Robin Hood's Cave on the left side of the lake, and Church Hole on the right.

Within these caverns and on the surface were found ornaments of the same age and character as those in the Victoria Cavern, and on digging beneath the surface into the cave-earth Mr. Mello met with the bones of lion, bison, hyena, tooth of machairodus, and also with the presence of woolly rhinoceros and mammoth; and associated with these remains were two or three fine bone implements, a perfect bone needle, some awls, a kind of gouge,† and an oval ironstone implement; and lastly, to the great joy of the finder, he extracted from this cave-earth, in the presence of Prof. Dawkins and Mr. Tiddeman, a bone which had scratched upon it the outline of a horse's head.

We have now, then, got overwhelming evidence of man's existence in Derbyshire at the same time as the woolly rhinoceros and mammoth. But now comes the question, what order of man? To what period did he belong? Most assuredly it was

* Daily Express, Dublin, August 17, 1878.

+ Quarterly Journal Geological Society, vol. xxiii. p. 586.

not Palæolithic man. Palæolithic man, if such a being ever existed, was a low savage, incapable of anything higher than simply chipping a flint for his weapon; when he reached the capacity of smoothing that weapon we had then arrived at the Neolithic age. Mr. Sydney Skertchley, F.G.S., who is now writing upon the subject of "The Antiquity of Man," says of the Paleoliths that they "were more degraded than any known savage tribe.”* But these men of Creswell Caves were workers in bone, artificers who used awls and gouges. They knew the use of the needle, and also wrought in iron,† for they left behind them one oval ironstone implement, and two more leaf-shaped, all worked to approved forms. There were also artists amongst them, for one of them had left his artistic product in the cavern, and Professor Boyd Dawkins, as an art critic, describes the work as follows: The most important discovery of the handiwork of man is the head and fore-quarters of a horse incised on a smoothed and rounded fragment of a rib, cut short off at one end, and broken at the other. On the flat side the head is represented with the nostrils, and mouth, and neck carefully drawn. A series of fine oblique lines show that the animal was hog-maned. Indeed, the whole is very well done, and is evidently a sketch from the life."§

Is this, Mr. President, the kind of product that you would expect from a Paleolithic savage?

Observe the artist's care in preparing his tablet. The bone is first "smoothed and rounded." It is "cut short off at one end." I particularly noticed in the bone the clean cut, and will ask the members of this Institute, could you cut a bone clean through with a Palæolithic implement? It looks much more like having been done with a saw. I don't say a metal saw saws have been made of flint; but there has been no proof of saws in Paleolithic times; and, then, observe that "the engraving is evidently a sketch from the life," and that the living model was a hog-maned horse.

Horses are not hog-maned in a state of nature, hog-manes are cut manes. The artist, then, that drew this horse lived at a time when horses' manes were cut to fashion; but Palæolithic times were by no means fashionable times either for men or horses.

It is also evident that you could not cut horses' manes with

* English Mechanic and World of Science, March 28, 1879, p. 49. + I accept the correction of the Rev. J. Mello made at the meeting. I ought to have said wrought on ironstone, instead of wrought in iron.

Journal of the Anthropological Institute, November, 1877, p. 153. Quarterly Journal Geological Society, 1877, pp. 582, 586.

§ Quarterly Journal Geological Society, 1877, p. 592,