A very remarkable discovery of the last five years made in the course of the careful excavation of the four caverns of Mentone by the Prince of Monaco, where as many as sixteen human skeletons of the Pleistocene Age have been brought to light, gives us a new point of view as to the presence of more than one race in Europe in these immensely remote times, as in later periods. In one of the caves, and in a position showing them to date from the deepest layer of the middle Pleistocene, or late Glacial Age, two complete skeletons have been found (and may be seen alongside those of the Cromagnon race in the museum at Monaco), which are obviously different from those of both the Neander and the Cromagnon people. They have skulls which decidedly resemble that of the modern negro race, so that they have been definitely assigned to a new race hitherto unknown in European caves, and are spoken of as “the negroid skeletons” and “the Grimaldi race.” This is indeed a startling fact. There was land stretching across the Mediterranean in those days, and these skeletons suggest that already there was a negroid race in Africa, individuals of which had wandered north as far as the maritime Alps.[9] Two or three negroid skulls of Neolithic (therefore very much later) Age have been found in Brittany and in Switzerland. When we reflect that the negroid skeletons of Mentone and those of the contemporary Neander Men are probably more than 100,000 years old, we are at once impressed with the important conclusion that already in that remote period three great branches of the human race had come into existence—the negroid, the Neander, and probably, at a more distant spot, also the highly developed Cromagnards. The origin of the really primitive race of man is thrown back in time by these facts to a still more remote period, in fact, to an earlier geologic epoch. And it is to be noted over and above these facts that we have no indication as to where the much later race, the Neolithic Men, came from, nor who were their contemporaries outside the European area; nor again do we know where the historic races who succeeded the Neolithic Men took their origin. When other regions of the earth have been examined as carefully as Western Europe has been, we shall no longer be in such complete darkness.