Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/178

160 depth from the surface, and yet be referable each to two sub-divisions of the post-pliocene epoch, separated by thousands of years.

The relation of the glacial period to alluvial deposits, such as that of Gray's Thurrock, where the Cyrena fluminalis, Unio littoralis, and the hippopotamus seem rather to imply a warmer climate, has been a matter of long and animated discussion. Patches of the northern drift, at elevations of about two hundred feet above the Thames, occur in the neighbourhood of London, as at Muswell Hill, near Highgate. In this drift, blocks of granite, syenite, greenstone, coal-measure sandstone with its fossils, and other palæozoic rocks, and the wreck of chalk and oolite, occur confusedly mixed together. The same glacial formation is also found capping some of the Essex hills farther to the east, and extending some way down their southern slopes towards the valley of the Thames. Although no fragments washed out of these older and upland drifts have been found in the gravel of the Thames containing elephants' bones, it is fair to presume that the glacial formation is the older of the two, for reasons given before at p. 130, and that it originated, as we shall see in a future chapter, when the greater part of England was submerged beneath the sea.

In short, we must suppose that the basin of the Thames and all its fluviatile deposits are post-glacial, in the modified sense of that term; i.e. that they were subsequent to the marine drift of the central and northern counties, and to the period of its emergence above the level of the sea.

Having offered these general remarks on the alluvium of the Thames, I may now say something of the implements hitherto discovered in it. In the British Museum there is a flint weapon of the spear-headed form, such as is represented in fig. 8, p. 114, which we are told was found with an elephant's tooth at Black Mary's, near Gray's Inn Lane, London. In a letter dated 1715, printed in Herne's edition of 'Leland's