Page:Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man.djvu/246

228 to the boulder clay, No. 4, pp. 213 and 224. The position of the Hoxne flint implements corresponds with that of the Mundesley beds, from to, p. 224, and the most likely stratum in which to find hereafter flint tools is no doubt the gravel  of that section which has all the appearance of an old river-bed. No flint tools have yet been observed there, but had the old alluvium of Amiens or Abbeville occurred in the Norfolk cliffs instead of the Valley of the Somme, and had we depended on the waves of the sea instead of the labour of many hundred workmen continued for twenty years, for exposing the flint implements to view, we might have remained ignorant to this day of the fossil relics brought to light by M. Boucher de Perthes, and those who have followed up his researches.

Neither need we despair of one day meeting with the signs of man's existence in the forest bed No. 3, or in the overlying strata 3', on the ground of any uncongeniality in the climate or incongruity in the state of the animate creation with the well-being of our species. For the present we must be content to wait and consider that we have made no investigations which entitle us to wonder that the bones or stone weapons of the era of the Elephas meridionalis have failed to come to light. If any such lie hid in those strata, and should hereafter be revealed to us, they would carry back the antiquity of man to a distance of time probably more than twice as great as that which separates our era from that of the most ancient of the tool-bearing gravels yet discovered in Picardy, or elsewhere. But even then the reader will perceive that the age of man, though preglacial, would be so modern in the great geological calendar, as given at p. 7, that he would scarcely date so far back as the commencement of the post-pliocene period.