Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/180

162 discoloured and of a peculiar bright light brown colour, similar to that of the old fluviatile gravel in the cliff.

Another flint implement was found in 1860, by Mr. T. Leech, at the foot of the cliff between Herne Bay and the Reculvers, and on further search five other specimens of the spear-head pattern so common at Amiens. Messrs. Prestwich and Evans have since found three other similar tools on the beach, at the base of the same wasting cliff, which consists of sandy Eocene strata. Upon these, at the top of the cliff, is a pebbly deposit of fresh-water origin, about fifty feet above the sea-level, from which the flint weapons must have been derived. Such old alluvial deposits now capping the cliffs of Kent seem to have been the river-beds of tributaries of the Thames before the sea encroached to its present position and widened its estuary. On following up one of these fresh-water deposits westward of the Reculvers, Mr. Prestwich found in it, at Chislet, near Grove Ferry, the Cyrena fluminalis among other shells.

The changes which have taken place in the physical geography of this part of England during, or since, the post-pliocene period, have consisted partly of such encroachments of the sea on the coast as are now going on, and partly of a general subsidence of the land. Among the signs of the latter movement may be mentioned a fresh-water formation at Faversham, below the level of the sea. The gravel there contains exclusively land and fluviatile shells, of the same species as those of other localities of the post-pliocene alluvium before mentioned, and must have been formed when the river was at a higher level and when it extended farther east. At that era it was probably a tributary of the Rhine, as represented by Mr. Trimmer in his ideal restoration of the geography of the olden time. For England was then united to the continent, and what is now the German Ocean was