Chapter 72
important bearings here. Mr. Boyd Dawkins has shown that the
great majority of animals which invaded Europe at the
commencement of this age, can be traced to Northern and Central
Asia, whence, owing to climatic changes, they migrated into
Europe.<54>
Inasmuch as man seems to have been intimately associated with
these animals, it seems to us very likely that he came with them
from their home in Asia. We think the tendency of modern
discoveries is to establish the fact that man arrived in Europe
along with the great invasion of species now living.<55>
Turning now to the authorities, we find this to be the accepted
theory of many of those competent to form an opinion.
In England Mr. Geikie has strongly urged the theory that the
Glacial Age includes not only periods of great cold, but also
epochs of exceptional mildness; and he strongly argues that all
the evidence of the River Drift tribes can be referred to these
warm interglacial epochs; in other words, that they were living
in Europe during the Glacial Age.<56>
In answer to this it has been stated that the relics of River
Drift tribes in Southern England overlie bowlder clay, and must
therefore be later in origin than the Glacial Age.<57>
But, Mr. Geikie and others have shown that the ice of the last
great cold did not overflow Southern England,<58> so that this
evidence, rightly read, was really an argument in favor of their
interglacial age.<59> The committee appointed by the British
Association to explore the Victoria Cave, near Settle, urge this
point very strongly in their final report of 1878.<60> To this
report Mr. Dawkins, a member of the committee, records his
dissent, but in his last great work he freely admits that man
was living in England during the Glacial Age, if he did not, in
fact, precede it.<61>
Mr. Skertchley, of the British coast survey, in 1879,<62>
announced the discovery in East Anglia of Paleolithic,
implements underlying the bowlder clay of that section.
Mr. Geikie justly regards this as a most important discovery.<63>
Finally Mr. Dawkins, in his address as President of the