The determination of a Palæolithic period for Europe, with its rude implements of flint or stone, chipped into shape without the aid of any grinding or polishing process, and belonging to an era when man was associated with animals either extinct or known only throughout the historic period in extreme northern latitudes, has naturally stimulated the research of American archæologists for corresponding traces on this continent. Nor is the anticipation of the possible recovery of the traces of man’s presence in post-glacial, or still earlier epochs in unhistoric areas, limited to either continent. If it be accepted as an established fact that man has existed in Europe for unnumbered ages, during which enormous physical changes have been wrought; upheaval and denudation have revolutionised the face of the continent; the deposition of the whole drift formation has been effected; the river-valleys of Southern England and the north of France have been excavated, and the British Islands detached from the neighbouring continent: it cannot be regarded as improbable that evidence may yet be found of the early presence of man in any region of the globe. Nevertheless some of the elements already referred to tend to mark with a character of their own the investigations alike of the archæologist and the geologist into the earliest traces of human art in what we have learned habitually to speak of as a New World. In Europe the antiquary, familiar already with ancient historic remains, had passed by a natural transition to the study of ruder examples of primitive art in stone and bronze, as well as to the physical characteristics of races which appeared to have preceeded the earliest historic nations. The occupation of the British Islands, for example, successively by Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes, and Normans, was so familiar to the popular mind that the problem of a sequence of neolithic, bronze, and the ruder iron implements with their correlated personal ornaments, pottery, etc., was universally solved by referring them to Celtic, Roman, and Scandinavian art. Erroneous as this interpretation of the evidence proves to have been, it had, nevertheless, sufficient accordance with truth to prepare the way for the ultimate reception of more accurate inductions. The fact of the occurrence of successive phases of art, and their indication of a succession of races, were undoubted; and researches directed to the solution of the problem of European archæology were unhesitatingly followed up through mediæval, classical, Assyrian and Egyptian remains, to the very threshold of that prehistoric dawn which forms the transitional stage between geological and historical epochs. A significant fact, in its bearing on the recent disclosures of the river-drift in France and England, is that some of the most characteristic flint implements, such as a large spear head found along with the remains of a fossil elephant in Gray’s Inn Lane, London, and