Page:The Zoologist, 4th series, vol 1 (1897).djvu/43

Rh improbable. When he told us, further, that the worked edges are commonly rounded off and blunted, and the worked surfaces stained of a deep brown colour, like the natural flint, so that the artificial work is often rendered obscure, he made an admission which is significant of a very great antiquity in the objects, if they be in fact implements worked by Man's hand.

Sir Joseph Prestwich himself, indeed, seemed to shrink from all the conclusions to which his researches into the antiquity of these objects appeared to lead him. If it should prove, he said, that the rude implements have been swept down from Central Wealden uplands forming in pre-glacial times a low mountain range 2000 to 3000 feet in height with the drift which has come from that quarter, they may have to be relegated to a very early period indeed; but that must be a question for the future. We cannot refuse to exercise the same degree of caution, though we run no risk in asserting that it must be exceedingly probable that the industry of fabricating flint implements was a progressive industry, commencing with rudimentary forms, and proceeding by degrees to more elaborate and finished work.

Elsewhere the same enquiry has been pursued, and Mr. Shrubsole has discovered flint implements of the like primitive type at Finchampstead and Old Dean, in Berkshire. Mr. Allen Brown has recognized that these roughly worked flints carry Man back to an earlier period than that called palæolithic, and suggests for it the name "eolithic." Mr. A.M. Bell has also studied the question, and arrived at the conclusion that Sir J. Prestwich was right in his views.

However this may be, there can be no doubt whatever as to the flint implements called palæolithic. One, now in the British Museum, was found in Gray's Inn Road as far back as 1690. Mr. John Frere, who in the year 1797 read a paper before the Society of Antiquaries, on some flint weapons discovered at Hoxne, in Suffolk, remarked that they were evidently weapons of war, fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals, and must be considered objects of curiosity from the situation in which they were found, which might tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed. A few other similar discoveries were made afterwards, but Mr. Frere's far-seeing suggestion remained unnoticed for sixty years, until M. Boucher Zool. 4th ser. vol. I., Jan. 1897.