ENGLAND.
Flint Implements in ancient Alluvium of the Basin of the Seine.
Bones of Man and of extinct Mammalia in the Cave of Arcy.
Extinct Mammalia in the Valley of the Oise.
Flint Implement in Gravel of same Valley.
Works of Art in Pleistocene Drift in Valley of the Thames.
Musk Ox.
Meeting of northern and southern Fauna.
Migrations of Quadrupeds.
Mammals of Mongolia.
Chronological Relation of the older Alluvium of the Thames to the
Glacial Drift.
Flint Implements of Pleistocene Period in Surrey, Middlesex, Kent,
Bedfordshire, and Suffolk.
FLINT IMPLEMENTS IN PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM IN THE BASIN OF THE SEINE.
In the ancient alluvium of the valleys of the Seine and its principal
tributaries, the same assemblage of fossil animals, which has been
alluded to in the last chapter as characterising the gravel of Picardy,
has long been known; but it was not till the year 1860, and when
diligent search had been expressly made for them, that flint implements
of the Amiens type were discovered in this part of France.
In the neighbourhood of Paris deposits of drift occur answering both to
those of the higher and lower levels of the basin of the Somme before
described.*
(* Prestwich, "Proceedings of the Royal Society" 1862.)
In both are found, mingled with the wreck of the Tertiary and Cretaceous
rocks of the vicinity, a large quantity of granitic sand and pebbles,
and occasionally large blocks of granite, from a few inches to a foot
or more in diameter. These blocks are peculiarly abundant in the lower
drift commonly called the "diluvium gris." The granitic materials are
traceable to a chain of hills called the Morvan, where the head waters
of the Yonne take their rise, 150 miles to the south-south-east of
Paris.
It was in this lowest gravel that M. H.T. Gosse, of Geneva, found, in
April 1860, in the suburbs of Paris, at La Motte Piquet, on the left
bank of the Seine, one or two well-formed flint implements of the Amiens
type, accompanied by a great number of ruder tools or attempts at tools.
I visited the spot in 1861 with M. Hebert, and saw the stratum from
which the worked flints had been extracted, 20 feet below the surface,
and near the bottom of the "grey diluvium," a bed of gravel from which
I have myself, in and near Paris, frequently collected the bones of the
elephant, horse, and other mammalia.
More recently, M. Lartet has discovered at Clichy, in the environs of
Paris, in the same lower gravel, a well-shaped flint implement of the
Amiens type, together with remains both of Elephas primigenius and
E. antiquus. No tools have yet been met with in any of the gravels
occurring at the higher levels of the valley of the Seine; but no
importance can be attached to this negative fact, as so little search
has yet been made for them.
Mr. Prestwich has observed contortions indicative of ice-action, of the
same kind as those near Amiens, in the higher-level drift of Charonne,
near Paris; but as yet no similar derangement has been seen in the
lower gravels--a fact, so far as it goes, in unison with the phenomena
observed in Picardy.
In the cavern of Arcy-sur-Yonne a series of deposits have lately been
investigated by the Marquis de Vibraye, who discovered human bones in
the lowest of them, mixed with remains of quadrupeds of extinct and
recent species. This cavern occurs in Jurassic limestone, at a slight
elevation above the Cure, a small tributary of the Yonne, which last
joins the Seine near Fontainebleau about 40 miles south of Paris. The
lowest formation in the cavern resembles the "diluvium gris" of Paris,
being composed of granitic materials, and like it derived chiefly from
the waste of the crystalline rocks of the Morvan. In it have been found
the two branches of a human lower jaw with teeth well-preserved, and
the bones of the Elephas primigenius, Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Ursus
spelaeus, Hyaena spelaea, and Cervus tarandus, all specifically
determined by M. Lartet. I have been shown this collection of fossils by
M. de Vibraye, and remarked that the human and other remains were in the
same condition and of the same colour.
Above the grey gravel is a bed of red alluvium, made up of fragments of
Jurassic limestone, in a red argillaceous matrix, in which were embedded
several flint knives, with bones of the reindeer and horse, but no
extinct mammalia. Over this, in a higher bed of alluvium, were several
polished hatchets of the more modern type called "celts," and above all
loam or cave-mud, in which were Gallo-Roman antiquities.*
(* "Bulletin de la Societe Geologique de France" 1860.)
The French geologists have made as yet too little progress in
identifying the age of the successive deposits of ancient alluvium of
various parts of the basin of the Seine, to enable us to speculate with
confidence as to the coincidence in date of the granitic gravel with
human bones of the Grotte d'Arcy and the stone-hatchets buried in "grey
diluvium" of La Motte Piquet, before mentioned; but as the associated
extinct mammalia are of the same species in both localities, I feel
strongly inclined to believe that the stone hatchets found by M. Gosse
at Paris, and the human bones discovered by M. de Vibraye, may be
referable to the same period.
VALLEY OF THE OISE.
A flint hatchet, of the old Abbeville and Amiens type, was found lately
by M. Peigne Delacourt at Precy, near Creil, on the Oise, in gravel,
resembling, in its geological position, the lower-level gravels of
Montiers, near Amiens, already described. I visited these extensive
gravel-pits in 1861, in company with Mr. Prestwich; but we remained
there too short a time to entitle us to expect to find a flint
implement, even if they had been as abundant as at St. Acheul.
In 1859, I examined, in a higher part of the same valley of the
Oise, near Chauny and Noyon, some fine railway cuttings, which passed
continuously through alluvium of the Pleistocene period for half a
mile. All this alluvium was evidently of fluviatile origin, for, in
the interstices between the pebbles, the Ancylus fluviatilis and other
freshwater shells were abundant. My companion, the Abbe E. Lambert,
had collected from the gravel a great many fossil bones, among which M.
Lartet has recognised both Elephas primigenius and E. antiquus, besides
a species of hippopotamus (H. major?), also the reindeer, horse, and the
musk ox (Bubalus moschatus). The latter seems never to have been seen
before in the old alluvium of France.*
(* Lartet, "Annales des Sciences Naturelles Zoologiques"
tome 15 page 224.)
Over the gravel above mentioned, near Chauny, are seen dense masses of
loam like the loess of the Rhine, containing shells of the genera
Helix and Succinea. We may suppose that the gravel containing the flint
hatchet at Precy is of the same age as that of Chauny, with which it is
continuous, and that both of them are coeval with the tool-bearing beds
of Amiens, for the basins of the Oise and the Somme are only separated
by a narrow water-shed, and the same fossil quadrupeds occur in both.
The alluvium of the Seine and its tributaries, like that of the Somme,
contains no fragments of rocks brought from any other hydrographical
basin; yet the shape of the land, or fall of the river, or the climate,
or all these conditions, must have been very different when the grey
alluvium in which the flint tools occur at Paris was formed. The great
size of some of the blocks of granite, and the distance which they have
travelled, imply a power in the river which it no longer possesses. We
can hardly doubt that river-ice once played a much more active part than
now in the transportation of such blocks, one of which may be seen in
the Museum of the Ecole des Mines at Paris, 3 or 4 feet in diameter.
PLEISTOCENE ALLUVIUM OF ENGLAND, CONTAINING WORKS OF ART.
In the ancient alluvium of the basin of the Thames, at moderate heights
above the main river and its tributaries, we find fossil bones of the
same species of extinct and living mammalia, accompanied by recent
species of land and freshwater shells, as we have shown to be
characteristic of the basins of the Somme and the Seine. We can
scarcely therefore doubt that these quadrupeds, during some part of
the Pleistocene period, ranged freely from the continent of Europe to
England, at a time when there was an uninterrupted communication by land
between the two countries. The reader will not therefore be surprised
to learn that flint implements of the same antique type as those of the
valley of the Somme have been detected in British alluvium.
The most marked feature of this alluvium in the Thames valley is that
great bed of ochreous gravel, composed chiefly of broken and slightly
worn Chalk flints, on which a great part of London is built. It extends
from above Maidenhead through the metropolis to the sea, a distance from
west to east of 50 miles, having a width varying from 2 to 9 miles. Its
thickness ranges commonly from 5 to 15 feet.*
(* Prestwich, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
volume 12 1856 page 131.)
Interstratified with this gravel, in many places, are beds of sand,
loam, and clay, the whole containing occasionally remains of the mammoth
and other extinct quadrupeds. Fine sections have been exposed to view,
at different periods, at Brentford and Kew Bridge, others in London
itself, and below it at Erith in Kent, on the right bank of the Thames,
and at Ilford and Gray's Thurrock in Essex, on the left bank. The united
thickness of the beds of sand, gravel, and loam amounts sometimes to 40
or even 60 feet. They are for the most part elevated above, but in some
cases they descend below, the present level of the overflowed plain of
the Thames.
If the reader will refer to the section of the Pleistocene sands and
gravels of Menchecourt, near Abbeville, given at page 96, he will
perfectly understand the relations of the ancient Thames alluvium to the
modern channel and plain of the river, and their relation, on the other
hand, to the boundary formations of older date, whether Tertiary or
Cretaceous.
So far as they are known, the fossil mollusca and mammalia of the two
districts also agree very closely, the Cyrena fluminalis being common to
both, and being the only extra-European shell, this and all the species
of testacea being Recent. Of this agreement with the living fauna there
is a fine illustration in Essex; for the determination of which we are
indebted to the late Mr. John Brown, F.G.S., who collected at Copford,
in Essex, from a deposit containing bones of the mammoth, a large bear
(probably Ursus spelaeus), a beaver, stag, and aurochs, no less than
sixty-nine species of land and freshwater shells. Forty-eight of these
were terrestrial, and two of them, Helix incarnata and H. ruderata, no
longer inhabit the British Isles, but are still living on the continent,
ruderata in high northern latitudes.*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 8
1852 page 190. Mr. Brown calls them extinct species, which
may mislead some readers, but he merely meant extinct in
England. See also Jeffreys, "Brit. Conch." page 174.)
The Cyrena fluminalis and the Unio littoralis, to which last I shall
presently allude, were not among the number.
I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames
there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a
northern and southern fauna. To the northern group may have belonged the
mammoth (Elephas primigenius) and the Rhinoceros tichorhinus, both of
which Pallas found in Siberia, preserved with their flesh in the ice.
With these are occasionally associated the reindeer. In 1855 the skull
of the musk ox (Bubalus moschatus) was also found in the ochreous
gravel of Maidenhead, by the Reverend C. Kingsley and Mr. Lubbock; the
identification of this fossil with the living species being made by
Professor Owen. A second fossil skull of the same arctic animal was
afterwards found by Mr. Lubbock near Bromley, in the valley of a small
tributary of the Thames; and two other skulls, those of a bull and a cow
were dug up near Bath Easton from the gravel of the valley of the Avon
by Mr. Charles Moore. Professor Owen has truly said, that "as this
quadruped has a constitution fitting it at present to inhabit the
high northern regions of America, we can hardly doubt that its former
companions, the warmly-clad mammoth and the two-horned woolly rhinoceros
(R. tichorhinus), were in like manner capable of supporting life in a
cold climate."*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 12
1856 page 124.)
I have already alluded to the recent discovery of this same ox near
Chauny, in the valley of the Oise, in France; and in 1856 I found
a skull of it preserved in the museum at Berlin, which Professor
Quenstedt, the curator, had correctly named so long ago as 1836, when
the fossil was dug out of drift, in the hill called the Kreuzberg, in
the southern suburbs of that city. By an account published at the time,
we find that the mammalia which accompanied the musk ox were the mammoth
and tichorhine rhinoceros, with the horse and ox;* but I can find no
record of the occurrence of a hippopotamus, nor of Elephas antiquus or
Rhinoceros leptorhinus, in the drift of the north of Germany, bordering
the Baltic.
(* "Leonhard and Bronn's Jahrbuch" 1836 page 215.)
On the other hand, in another locality in the same drift of North
Germany, Dr. Hensel, of Berlin, detected, near Quedlinburg, the
Norwegian Lemming (Myodes lemmus), and another species of the same
family called by Pallas Myodes torquatus (by Hensel, Misothermus
torquatus)--a still more arctic quadruped, found by Parry in latitude 82
degrees, and which never strays farther south than the northern borders
of the woody region. Professor Beyrich also informs me that the remains
of the Rhinoceros tichorhinus were obtained at the same place.*
(* "Zeitschrift der Deutschen Geologischen Gesellschaft"
volume 7 1855 page 497 etc.)
As an example of what may possibly have constituted a more southern
fauna in the valley of the Thames, I may allude to the fossil remains
found in the fluviatile alluvium of Gray's Thurrock, in Essex, situated
on the left bank of the river, 21 miles below London. The strata of
brick-earth, loam, and gravel exposed to view in artificial excavations
in that spot, are precisely such as would be formed by the silting up
of an old river channel. Among the mammalia are Elephas antiquus,
Rhinoceros leptorhinus (R. megarhinus, Christol), Hippopotamus major,
species of horse, bear, ox, stag, etc., and, among the accompanying
shells, Cyrena fluminalis, which is extremely abundant, instead of being
scarce, as at Abbeville. It is associated with Unio littoralis also in
great numbers and with both valves united. This conspicuous freshwater
mussel is no longer an inhabitant of the British Isles, but still
lives in the Seine, and is still more abundant in the Loire. Another
freshwater univalve (Paludina marginata, Michaud), not British, but
common in the south of France, likewise occurs, and a peculiar variety
of Cyclas amnica, which by some naturalists has been regarded as a
distinct species. With these, moreover, is found a peculiar variety of
Valvata piscinalis.
If we consult Dr. Von Schrenck's account of the living mammalia of
Mongolia, lying between latitude 45 and 55 degrees north, we learn
that, in that part of North-Eastern Asia recently annexed to the Russian
empire, no less than thirty-four out of fifty-eight living quadrupeds
are identical with European species, while some of those which do not
extend their range to Europe are arctic, others tropical forms. The
Bengal tiger ranges northwards occasionally to latitude 52 degrees
north, where he chiefly subsists on the flesh of the reindeer, and the
same tiger abounds in latitude 48 degrees, to which the small tailless
hare or pika, a polar resident, sometimes wanders southwards.*
(* Mammalia of Amoorland, "Natural History Review" volume 1
1861 page 12.)
We may readily conceive that the countries now drained by the Thames,
the Somme, and the Seine, were, in the Pleistocene period, on the
borders of two distinct zoological provinces, one lying to the north,
the other to the south, in which case many species belonging to each
fauna endowed with migratory habits, like the living musk-ox or the
Bengal tiger, may have been ready to take advantage of any, even the
slightest, change in their favour to invade the neighbouring province,
whether in the summer or winter months, or permanently for a series of
years, or centuries. The Elephas antiquus and its associated Rhinoceros
leptorhinus may have preceded the mammoth and tichorhine rhinoceros in
the valley of the Thames, or both may have alternately prevailed in the
same area in the Pleistocene period.
In attempting to settle the chronology of fluviatile deposits, it is
almost equally difficult to avail ourselves of the evidence of organic
remains and of the superposition of the strata, for we may find two old
river-beds on the same level in juxtaposition, one of them perhaps
many thousands of years posterior in date to the other. I have seen an
example of this at Ilford, where the Thames, or a tributary stream, has
at some former period cut through sands containing Cyrena fluminalis,
and again filled up the channel with argillaceous matter, evidently
derived from the waste of the Tertiary London Clay. Such shiftings
of the site of the main channel of the river, the frequent removal
of gravel and sand previously deposited, and the throwing down of new
alluvium, the flooding of tributaries, the rising and sinking of the
land, fluctuations in the cold and heat of the climate--all these
changes seem to have given rise to that complexity in the fluviatile
deposits of the Thames, which accounts for the small progress we have
hitherto made in determining their order of succession, and that of
the imbedded groups of quadrupeds. It may happen, as at Brentford and
Ilford, that sand-pits in two adjoining fields may each contain distinct
species of elephant and rhinoceros; and the fossil remains in both
cases may occur at the same depth from the surface, yet may be severally
referable to different parts of the Pleistocene epoch, separated by
thousands of years.
The relation of the glacial period to alluvial deposits, such as that of
Gray's Thurrock, where the Cyrena fluminalis, Unio littoralis, and the
hippopotamus seem rather to imply a warmer climate, has been a matter
of long and animated discussion. Patches of the northern drift,
at elevations of about 200 feet above the Thames, occur in the
neighbourhood of London, as at Muswell Hill, near Highgate. In this
drift, blocks of granite, syenite, greenstone, Coal-measure sandstone
with its fossils, and other Palaeozoic rocks, and the wreck of Chalk and
Oolite, occur confusedly mixed together. The same glacial formation
is also found capping some of the Essex hills farther to the east, and
extending some way down their southern slopes towards the valley of
the Thames. Although no fragments washed out of these older and upland
drifts have been found in the gravel of the Thames containing elephants'
bones, it is fair to presume, as Mr. Prestwich has contended,* that the
glacial formation is the older of the two.
(* Prestwich, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
volume 11 1855 page 110; ibid. volume 12 1856 page 133;
ibid. volume 17 1861 page 446.)
In short, we must suppose that the basin of the Thames and all its
fluviatile deposits are post-glacial, in the modified sense of that
term; i.e. that they were subsequent to the drift of the central and
northern counties.
Having offered these general remarks on the alluvium of the Thames, I
may now say something of the implements hitherto discovered in it. In
the British Museum there is a flint weapon of the spear-headed form,
such as is represented in Figure 8, which we are told was found with
an elephant's tooth at Black Mary's, near Gray's Inn Lane, London. In a
letter dated 1715, printed in Herne's edition of "Leland's Collectanea,"
volume 1 page 73, it is stated to have been found in the presence of Mr.
Conyers, with the skeleton of an elephant.*
(* Evans, "Archaeologia" 1860.)
So many bones of the elephant, rhinoceros, and hippopotamus have been
found in the gravel on which London stands, that there is no reason to
doubt the statement as handed down to us. Fossil remains of all these
three genera have been dug up on the site of Waterloo Place, St. James's
Square, Charing Cross, the London Docks, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, and
other places within the memory of persons now living. In the gravel and
sand of Shacklewell, in the north-east district of London, I have myself
collected specimens of the Cyrena fluminalis in great numbers (see
Figure 17 c), with the bones of deer and other mammalia.
In the alluvium also of the Wey, near Guildford, in a place called Pease
Marsh, a wedge-shaped flint implement, resembling one brought from
St. Acheul by Mr. Prestwich, and compared by some antiquaries to a
sling-stone, was obtained in 1836 by Mr. Whitburn, 4 feet deep in sand
and gravel, in which the teeth and tusks of elephants had been found.
The Wey flows through the gorge of the North Downs at Guildford to join
the Thames. Mr. Austen has shown that this drift is so ancient that one
part of it had been disturbed and tilted before another part was thrown
down.*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 7
1851 page 278.)
Among other places where flint tools of the antique type have been met
with in the course of the last three years, I may mention one of an oval
form found by Mr. Whitaker in the valley of the Darent, in Kent, and
another which Mr. Evans found lying on the shore at Swalecliff, near
Whitstable, in the same county, where Mr. Prestwich had previously
described a freshwater deposit, resting on the London Clay, and
consisting chiefly of gravel, in which an elephant's tooth and the bones
of a bear were embedded. The flint implement was deeply discoloured
and of a peculiar bright light-brown colour, similar to that of the old
fluviatile gravel in the cliff.
Another flint implement was found in 1860 by Mr. T. Leech, at the foot
of the cliff between Herne Bay and the Reculvers, and on further search
five other specimens of the spear-head pattern so common at Amiens.
Messrs. Prestwich and Evans have since found three other similar tools
on the beach, at the base of the same wasting cliff, which consists of
sandy Eocene strata, covered by a gravelly deposit of freshwater origin,
about 50 feet above the sea-level, from which the flint weapons must
have been derived. Such old alluvial deposits now capping the cliffs
of Kent seem to have been the river-beds of tributaries of the Thames
before the sea encroached to its present position and widened its
estuary. On following up one of these freshwater deposits westward of
the Reculvers, Mr. Prestwich found in it, at Chislet, near Grove Ferry,
the Cyrena fluminalis among other shells.
The changes which have taken place in the physical geography of this
part of England during, or since, the Pleistocene period, have consisted
partly of such encroachments of the sea on the coast as are now going
on, and partly of a general subsidence of the land. Among the signs
of the latter movement may be mentioned a freshwater formation at
Faversham, below the level of the sea. The gravel there contains
exclusively land and fluviatile shells of the same species as those of
other localities of the Pleistocene alluvium before mentioned, and
must have been formed when the river was at a higher level and when it
extended farther east. At that era it was probably a tributary of the
Rhine, as represented by Mr. Trimmer in his ideal restoration of the
geography of the olden time.*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 9
1853 Plate 8 Number 4.)
For England was then united to the continent, and what is now the North
Sea was 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 Chapter 13 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.
FLINT IMPLEMENTS OF THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE, NEAR BEDFORD.
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. By observations made in
1854 and 1858, Mr. Prestwich had ascertained that the valley was bounded
on both sides by Oolitic strata, capped by boulder clay, and that the
gravel Number 3, Figure 23, contained bones of the elephant, rhinoceros,
hippopotamus, ox, horse, and deer, which animals he therefore inferred
must have been posterior in date to the boulder clay, through which, as
well as the subjacent Oolite, the valley had been excavated. Mr. Evans
had found in the same gravel many land and freshwater shells, and these
discoveries induced Mr. James Wyatt, of Bedford, to pay two visits to
St. Acheul in order to compare the implement-bearing gravels of the
Somme with the drift of the valley of the Ouse. After his return
he resolved to watch carefully the excavation of the gravel-pits at
Biddenham, 2 miles west-north-west 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
French types. Both specimens were thrown out by the workmen on the same
day from the lowest bed of stratified gravel and sand, 13 feet thick,
containing bones of the elephant, deer, and ox, and many freshwater
shells. The two implements occurred at the depth of 13 feet from the
surface of the soil, and rested immediately on solid beds of Oolitic
limestone, as represented in the accompanying section (Figure 23).
Having been invited by Mr. Wyatt to verify these facts, I went to
Biddenham within a fortnight of the date of his discovery (April
1861), and, for the first time, saw evidence which satisfied me of the
chronological relations of those three phenomena, the antique tools, the
extinct mammalia, and the glacial formation. On that occasion I examined
the pits in company with Messrs. Prestwich, Evans, and Wyatt, and we
collected ten species of shells from the stratified drift Number 3, or
the beds overlying the lowest gravel from which the flint implements had
been exhumed. They were all of common fluviatile and land species now
living in the same part of England. Since our visit, Mr. Wyatt has
added to them Paludina marginata, Michaud (Hydrobia of some authors), a
species of the South of France no longer inhabiting the British Isles.
The same geologist has also found, since we were at Biddenham, several
other flint tools of corresponding type, both there and at other
localities in the valley of the Ouse, near Bedford.
[Figure 23. Valley of the Ouse]
(FIGURE 23. SECTION ACROSS THE VALLEY OF THE OUSE, TWO MILES
WEST-NORTH-WEST OF BEDFORD.*
(* Prestwich, "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society"
volume 17 1861 page 364; and Wyatt, "Geologist" 1861 page 242.)
1. Oolitic strata.
2. Boulder clay, or marine northern drift, rising to about
ninety feet above the Ouse.
3. Ancient gravel, with elephant bones, freshwater shells,
and flint implements.
4. Modern alluvium of the Ouse.
a. Biddenham gravel pits, at the bottom of which flint tools
were found.)
The boulder clay Number 2 extends for miles in all directions, and was
evidently once continuous from b to c before the valley was scooped
out. It is a portion of the great marine glacial drift of the midland
counties of England, and contains blocks, some of large size, not
only of the Oolite of the neighbourhood, but of Chalk and other rocks
transported from still greater distances, such as syenite, basalt,
quartz, and New Red Sandstone. These erratic blocks of foreign origin
are often polished and striated, having undergone what is called
glaciation, of which more will be said by and by. Blocks of the same
mineral character, embedded at Biddenham in the gravel Number 3, have
lost all signs of this striation by the friction to which they were
subjected in the old river bed.
The great width of the valley of the Ouse, which is sometimes 2 miles,
has not been expressed in the diagram. It may have been shaped out by
the joint action of the river and the tides when this part of England
was emerging from the waters of the glacial sea, the boulder clay being
first cut through, and then an equal thickness of underlying Oolite.
After this denudation, which may have accompanied the emergence of the
land, the country was inhabited by the primitive people who fashioned
the flint tools. The old river, aided perhaps by the continued upheaval
of the whole country, or by oscillations in its level, went on widening
and deepening the valley, often shifting its channel, until at length
a broad area was covered by a succession of the earliest and latest
deposits, which may have corresponded in age to the higher and lower
gravels of the valley of the Somme, already described.
At Biddenham, and elsewhere in the same gravel, remains of Elephas
antiquus have been discovered, and Mr. Wyatt obtained, January 1863,
a flint implement associated with bones and teeth of hippopotamus from
gravel at Summerhouse hill, which lies east of Bedford, lower down the
valley of the Ouse, and 4 miles from Biddenham.
One step at least we gain by the Bedford sections, which those of
Amiens and Abbeville had not enabled us to make. They teach us that the
fabricators of the antique tools, and the extinct mammalia coeval with
them, were all post-glacial.
FLINT IMPLEMENTS IN A FRESHWATER DEPOSIT AT HOXNE IN SUFFOLK [17].
So early as the first year of the nineteenth century, a remarkable paper
was communicated to the Society of Antiquaries by Mr. John Frere, in
which he gave a clear description of the discovery at Hoxne, near Diss,
in Suffolk, of flint tools of the type since found at Amiens, adding at
the same time good geological reasons for presuming that their antiquity
was very great, or, as he expressed it, beyond that of the present
world, meaning the actual state of the physical geography of that
region. "The flints," he said, "were evidently weapons of war,
fabricated and used by a people who had not the use of metals. They
lay in great numbers at the depth of about 12 feet in a stratified soil
which was dug into for the purpose of raising clay for bricks. Under
a foot and a half of vegetable earth was clay 7 1/2 feet thick, and
beneath this one foot of sand with shells, and under this 2 feet of
gravel, in which the shaped flints were found generally at the rate of
5 or 6 in a square yard. In the sandy beds with shells were found the
jawbone and teeth of an enormous unknown animal. The manner in which the
flint weapons lay would lead to the persuasion that it was a place of
their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit. Their numbers
were so great that the man who carried on the brick-work told me that
before he was aware of their being objects of curiosity, he had emptied
baskets full of them into the ruts of the adjoining road."
Mr. Frere then goes on to explain that the strata in which the flints
occur are disposed horizontally, and do not lie at the foot of any
higher ground, so that portions of them must have been removed when the
adjoining valley was hollowed out. If the author had not mistaken the
freshwater shells associated with the tools for marine species, there
would have been nothing to correct in his account of the geology of
the district, for he distinctly perceived that the strata in which the
implements were embedded had, since that time, undergone very extensive
denudation.*
(* Frere, "Archaeologia" volume 13 1800 page 206.)
Specimens of the flint spear-heads, sent to London by Mr. Frere, are
still preserved in the British Museum, and others are in the collection
of the Society of Antiquaries.
[Illustration: Figure 24. Position of Flint Weapons]
(FIGURE 24. SECTION SHOWING THE POSITION OF THE FLINT WEAPONS
AT HOXNE, NEAR DISS, SUFFOLK.
See Prestwich "Philosophical Transactions" Plate 11 1860.)
1. Gravel of Gold Brook, a tributary of the Waveney.
2. Higher-level gravel overlying the freshwater deposit.
3 and 4. Sand and gravel, with freshwater shells, and
flint implements, and bones of mammalia.
5. Peaty and clayey beds, with same fossils.
6. Boulder clay or glacial drift.
7. Sand and gravel below boulder clay.
8. Chalk with flints.)
Mr. Prestwich's attention was called by Mr. Evans to these weapons, as
well as to Mr. Frere's memoir after his return from Amiens in 1859,
and he lost no time in visiting Hoxne, a village five miles eastward of
Diss. It is not a little remarkable that he should have found, after a
lapse of sixty years, that the extraction of clay was still going on
in the same brick-pit. Only a few months before his arrival, two flint
instruments had been dug out of the clay, one from a depth of 7 and the
other of 10 feet from the surface. Others have since been disinterred
from undisturbed beds of gravel in the same pit. Mr. Amyot of Diss has
also obtained from the underlying freshwater strata the astragalus of an
elephant, and bones of the deer and horse; but although many of the old
implements have recently been discovered in situ in regular strata and
preserved by Sir Edward Kerrison, no bones of extinct mammalia seem
as yet to have been actually seen in the same stratum with one of the
tools.
By reference to the annexed section, the geologist will see that the
basin-shaped hollow a, b, c has been filled up gradually with the
freshwater strata 3, 4, 5, after the same cavity a, b, c had been
previously excavated out of the more ancient boulder clay Number 6. The
relative position of these formations will be better understood when
I have described in the twelfth chapter the structure of Norfolk and
Suffolk as laid open in the sea-cliffs at Mundesley, about 30 miles
distant from Hoxne, in a north-north-east direction.
I examined the deposits at Hoxne in 1860, when I had the advantage of
being accompanied by the Reverend J. Gunn and the Reverend S.W. King.
In the loamy beds 3 and 4, Figure 24, we observed the common river shell
Valvata piscinalis in great numbers. With it, but much more rare, were
Limnaea palustris, Planorbis albus, P. Spirorbis, Succinea putris,
Bithynia tentaculata, Cyclas cornea; and Mr. Prestwich mentions Cyclas
amnica and fragments of a Unio, besides several land shells. In the
black peaty mass Number 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.
FLINT IMPLEMENTS AT ICKLINGHAM IN SUFFOLK.
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 teeth of
Elephas primigenius and several flint tools, chiefly of a lance-head
form, have been found. I have twice visited the spot, which has been
correctly described by Mr. Prestwich.*
(* "Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society" volume 17
1861, page 364.)
The section of the Bedford tool-bearing alluvium, given in Figure 23,
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 30 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 100 feet above the Lark. About twelve years ago, a large
erratic block, above 4 feet in diameter, was dug out of the boulder
clay at Icklingham, which I found to consist of a hard siliceous schist,
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.