Mr Wilson commences with a glance at that problem of the “antiquity of man” which Sir Charles Lyell has still more lately and more fully treated. Perhaps, if he had written after the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s work, he would have expressed himself with more distinctness on the subject; yet he seems substantially to have arrived at whatever safe conclusions the evidence hitherto collected enables us to rest in. He has said all that can really be said at present on the matter. He observes that “the closing epoch of geology must be turned to for the initial chapters of archæology and ethnology.” It is plain that man could not make his appearance upon the earth till the earth was fitted for his habitation; and it is a reasonable conjecture that it would not long be so prepared for him before, in some part of the world, he made his appearance. Mr Wilson is not disposed to be incredulous as “to the traces of fossil human bones mingling with those of the extinct mammals of the drift;” but we gather from his work that he would be slow to rest his belief on the great antiquity of man solely on the discovery of such flint implements as have been dug out of the valley of the Somme and elsewhere. We think that, notwithstanding the confidence of certain _experts_ who have pronounced that these flints have received their form from the hand of man, there is a well-founded suspicion that, after all, they may have been broken into their present shape by natural or physical forces. They are not ground to a point, it must be remembered, nor sharpened to an edge, only chipped into a wedge-like form. When we read of great numbers of these flints being discovered in a certain spot, and that a _selection_ is made of such as seem to have been chipped by the hand of man, _and that this selection is a matter of acknowledged difficulty_, we may be excused for suspending our judgment as to the fact whether any one of them was ever the tool or implement of a human being. We may be excused if, in the present state of the evidence, we require that this testimony of the flints be _confirmed_ by other testimony,—by the presence of human bones, or of indisputable works of human art in the same post-pliocene formation.[2] We do not presumptuously reject their evidence altogether; we do not take it upon ourselves to say that not one of the stones collected from the valley of the Somme has been fashioned by man; we have little trust in our own judgment upon such a matter; but it is not evidence which can _stand alone_. This Sir Charles Lyell admits himself, though in some passages of his work he seems to forget his own admission. But such antiquity as we can assign to man on other evidence—by the discovery in certain positions of human remains or indisputable relics of human art—is very great, and sufficient for all the purposes of the ethnologist. The elaborate, and, to the geologist, highly interesting work of Sir Charles