When one ventures to speculate as to the story of the earliest men in Europe, one can but feel, even after handling the specimens and carefully following the excavations, how small and fragmentary and difficult to interpret is the evidence at present brought to light. And yet there the evidence is, gathered with the utmost care and intelligent method, discussed and interpreted by men of rare knowledge and experience, who, after long comparison of contending opinions and the discovery of an ever-increasing body of fact, have arrived at a definite certainty as to the sequence of arts, races, animals, and climates which I have given above, and is again summarised in the tabular statement on page 384 _bis_. Hereafter these conclusions will be modified and extended by excavations in other parts of the world, at present untouched. The one point upon which the best authorities will not commit themselves is the exact, or even approximately exact, number of thousands of years which these events have occupied. The whole story, so far as it is at present worked out, is a marvellous result of patient research and scientific reasoning. Some of the cave collections upon which it is based are to be seen in London, in the British Museum. [Illustration: FIG. 78.—The skull-top of the primitive kind of man from Pleistocene sands in Java, called _Pithecanthropus_. One-third (linear) of the natural size. Compare with Fig. 65, and refer to that figure for the explanation of the letters and dotted lines.]