Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/181

Rh land. It is well known that in many places, especially near the coast of Holland, elephants' tusks and other bones are often dredged up from the bed of that shallow sea, and the reader will see in the map given in Chap. XIII.XIV. [sic] how vast would be the conversion of sea into land by an upheaval of 600 feet. Vertical movements of much less than half that amount would account for the annexation of England to the continent, and the extension of the Thames and its valley far to the north east, and the flowing of rivers from the easternmost parts of Kent and Essex into the Thames, instead of emptying themselves into its estuary.

More than a dozen flint weapons of the Amiens type have already been found in the basin of the Thames; but the geological position of no one of them has as yet been ascertained with the same accuracy as that of many of the tools dug up in the valley of the Somme, or some other British examples which will presently be mentioned.

The ancient fluviatile gravel of the valley of the Ouse, around Bedford, has been noted for the last thirty years for yielding to collectors a rich harvest of the bones of extinct mammalia; those of the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus being amongst the number. Mr. James Wyatt, F.G.S., having returned in 1860 from France, where, in the gravel-pits of St. Acheul, near Amiens, he had marked the position of the flint tools, resolved to watch carefully the excavation of the gravel-pits at Biddenham, two miles WNW. of Bedford, in the hope of finding there similar works of art. With this view he paid almost daily visits for months in succession to those pits, and was at last rewarded by the discovery of two well-formed implements, one of the spear-head and the other of the oval shape, perfect counterparts of the two prevailing