144 Primaeval Man in the Valley of the Lea.
at this time accurately define his mental and bodily outline.
At times there is a slight flicker of new light—too often, it
must be confessed, a light that speedily dies out, or is proved
to be delusive. New facts about primaeval man come in very
slowly, but the time will one day certainly arrive when we
shall be able to place his bones together. In times like these
it is necessary to remember that we require nothing but facts
—we want the truth. No idle fancies, or highly coloured or
erroneous statements, are wanted. Palaeolithic man has quite
recently been described in a popular scientific periodical as
a low-browed, flat-headed, dog-jawed, black-skinned, hog-
tusked, short-legged savage, worse in type than the lowest
savage of the present day—in other words, an animal more
repulsive than a baboon. The same writer instructed us
that, after the river-drift and cave implements were made,
Northern Europe was submerged for many hundred feet under
the sea and then came up again. These statements regarding
the men are sensational libels, having no foundation in fact.
I admit that we may have had a demon-like progenitor of
the baboon class in the long past, but that was long before
the time of the men of the river-gravels, and vastly longer
before the time of the skilful and artistic Palaeolithic cave-
dwellers. No doubt the river-drift men were different from
the men of modern times; probably they differed somewhat
in colour, form, and hairiness; but as modern Elephants,
Lions, Hyaenas, Horses, and other beasts do not enormously
differ in form and character from the allied animals of the
river-gravels, why should modern man differ from the river-
drift man in an enormous degree?
It need hardly be said that the river-drift men had no
written language; they lived a very long time before any
cup-marking or ogham lines and notches were thought of;
yet these men must have had some means of expressing
their passions and thoughts, chiefly, perhaps, by a few
partially-articulate sounds and significant gestures.
Primaeval man lived in vast numbers on the banks of the
Lea ; he also certainly lived in South Essex on the northern
banks of the Thames, and, as I have shown, in the Valley of