Page:Antiquity of Man as Deduced from the Discovery of a Human Skeleton.djvu/20

14 Among the earlier acquisitions of Human remains from other than cave-localities, the lower jaw from the gravel-beds of Moulin-Quignon, investigated at Paris by joint French and English naturalists, may here be mentioned. It is sometimes referred to as a "fossil;" but the chemical composition, showing the proportion of original gelatine which it had lost and the kind and amount of extraneous mineral matter added to or replacing the phosphate of lime, has not, that I can find, been anywhere recorded.

The corpse of the individual whose osteological characters have been above noted found its grave about 3 feet below the surface of sand on which he trod—such surface having since subsided to a depth of 30 feet below the marsh-level forming the present banks of the Thames at that locality, and has there received successive deposits of the vertical extent severally noted in the "Section of Strata," facing p. 3. Portions of decayed blackened wood were found in the uppermost part of the sandy stratum, 9; and this stratum has been excavated to a depth of 10 feet since the discovery of the skeleton, and been found to rest upon the gravel known as "ballast" ("Section," no. 10).

The oldest known tool fashioned by human hands—the unpolished adze of flint—is, so far as I can learn, the sole evidence of a British palæolithic riverside man which has yet been recorded, at least on the Thames’ banks, including the Tilbury locality whence the subject of the present tract was exhumed.

Bones which have similarly parted with a proportion of their original gelatine, and have received mineral additions to the bone-earth they retained, gaining for them the term "fossil," have been found on the North Bank associated