Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/586

454 canoes. It also appears, from the depositions of witnesses laid before Parliament in 1696 in support of a petition for the removal of Denver Sluice, that, prior to 1650, when the sluice was erected, the tide flowed twenty-four miles further than it then did into "the deep rivers of Ouse, Stoke (the Wissey), Grant (the Cam), and Mildenhall (the Larke);" and one witness deposed that before the dam was built the tide flowed up to Wilton Lode, which is just two miles from Brandon, and at the foot of the hill above described.

From these details it will be seen that these beds in every material particular bear a close resemblance to those of the Somme, which have been so well described by Mr. Prestwich. In each, the implements are for the most part found in a bed of coarse flint-gravel, which rests immediately upon the chalk, and is overlain by other masses of gravel and siliceous and calcareous sands. In both deposits the implements are of the same material, the same, or nearly the same fashion, in similar condition, and associated also with similar mammalian remains, and each is destitute of those fossils which are wanting in the other. This remarkable correspondence between these beds in the South-east of England and those of the north of France not only tends to confirm the opinion which has been formed on other grounds, that at the commencement of the Quaternary epoch the two countries had not been severed, but leads to the belief that even at this early period they were inhabited by man.

Nor is the resemblance which these valleys bear to each other confined to the lower beds. In both, as we approach the coast, and at about the same distance from it, the drift-gravel is overlain by a thick bed of peat, which entombs the remains of ancient forests of similar character, and in either country is found to contain similar mammalian remains, associated with implements or weapons of like material and workmanship. We have thus the same evidence in both countries that the first known stage of the Quaternary period has passed away, and a new and well-defined era has arrived. In England, as in France, the great Pachyderms have entirely disappeared, and are succeeded by a new fauna adapted to new conditions, and to be superseded in due time by other creatures and other conditions. As the Beaver, Wild Boar, Bos longifrons, the Roe, and the Red Deer have replaced the Elephant, the Rhinoceros, and the Hippopotamus, so instead of the rude implements fabricated by the men who were contemporary with these animals, the fens of Norfolk and Cambridgeshire as well as those of Picardy are found to contain the polished flint and stone implements of a far later period, and pudding-stone querns of precisely similar material and form.

Such being the phenomena presented to our notice, it remains to consider what light they throw upon the origin and history of the implements. Hitherto it has been usual to place them in the same category with the beds in, or beneath, which they occur; they are