Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/187

Rh several land shells. In the black peaty mass No. 5, fragments of wood of the oak, yew, and fir have been recognised. The flint weapons which I have seen from Hoxne are so much more perfect, and have their cutting edge so much sharper than those from the Valley of the Somme, that they seem neither to have been used by man, nor to have been rolled in the bed of a river. The opinion of Mr. Frere, therefore, that there may have been a manufactory of weapons on the spot, appears probable.

In another part of Suffolk, at Icklingham, in the Valley of the Lark, below Bury St. Edmund's, there is a bed of gravel, in which two flints of a lance-head form have been found at the depth of four feet from the surface. I have visited the spot, which has been correctly described by Mr. Prestwich.

The section of the Bedford tool-bearing alluvium, given at p. 155, may serve to illustrate that of Icklingham, if we substitute chalk for oolite, and the river Lark for the Ouse. In both cases, the present bed of the river is about thirty feet below the level of the old gravel, and the chalk hill, which bounds the Valley of the Lark on the right side, is capped like the oolite of Biddenham by boulder clay, which rises to the height of one hundred feet above the Lark. About twelve years ago, a large erratic block, above four feet in diameter, was dug out of the boulder clay at Icklingham, which I found to consist of a hard siliceous schist, apparently a Silurian rock, which must have come from a remote region. The tool-bearing gravel here, as in the case to which it has been compared near Bedford, is proved to be newer than the glacial drift, by containing pebbles of basalt and other rocks derived from that formation.