His words are:-"That there are, even in gravel-walks, small flints of analogous shapes, but by no means identical with those of the plateau-gravel, is quite true, and some approach to their peculiar shapes may occasionally be seen elsewhere, but the Eoliths' are distinct. Doubtless frost in splitting stones can form more or less parallel-sided flakes, often concave and thin on one edge, and convex and thick on the other, and that the thin edge may be readily modified by natural and accidental causes; but the hooked and hollow-curved plateau implements have the concave edge thick, and intentionally chipped and hammered."*

§ V. Torrent- or river-action.-Many of the eoliths show contusions caused by rapidly moving water, but the contusion is on the chipped surfaces by which man had previously converted them into implements. It has blunted and obliterated the originally sharp margins of the parallel depressions, which have truncated one another by a series of intentional blows round a roughly regular edge: but such contusion was not the cause of chipping and is (in all cases which I have examined) demonstrably posterior to it in point of time.

It must be remembered that water resists compression (that is the principle of the Bramah press, hydraulic jack, etc.), and in the collision of flint stones one on another by water in violent motion, the water becomes at the same time an elastic cushion between them as they are jostled together; for the greater the aqueous force that flings them together the greater the compression of the water between them, and pro rata the weaker the resultant collision.

However strongly the suggestion has been made, that aqueous agencies have produced the chipped or hacked edges of these plateau flints, it is a mere assertion; no one has yet produced a series of examples, due to known aqueous agency, whether fluviatile or marine, actually resembling eoliths.

So far then Sir Joseph Prestwich's theory of their human origin holds the field.

§ VI. Eoliths: their ochreous stain or colour.-The stain on

Journ. Anthrop. Inst., 1898, p. 53. Mr. W. Cunnington, F.G.S., boldly referred the production of the various apparent flakes and chippings on the Kentish Eoliths to the influence of successive glacial periods in his paper on the " Non-authenticity of Plateau Implements" (Natural Science, vol. xi, No. 69, p. 332).

the flints of the Plateau drift is not always of the same tint. In some cases the colour is a deep dull brown,* in others there is more polish and a consequently brighter and richer colour, and in some few the tint is of a warm red. This latter tint also occurs, I know, in flints from the glacial gravels of Wells, Norfolk.

§ VII. The Red- Clay-with-Flints.-This brown or red stain is not derived from the colouring matter of the "red-claywith-flints."

Mr. W. Whitaker, F.R.S.,† considers "that the clay-withflints may be of many ages, and may be forming even at the present day, and that it is owing in great part to the slow decomposition of the chalk under atmospheric action." To the residual flints and earthy matter "would be added the clayey and loamy wash from the Tertiary lands, and the remains of beds of that age left in pipes and hollows in the chalk."

In 1891, I made several excavations in the red-clay-withflints, varying from three to eight feet deep, in the " Great North Field" and "Paradise" above Dunstall Priory, Shoreham, Kent, in search for eolithic implements, in each case down to the undisturbed chalk. Among the objects in this red clay was an abundance of green-coated flints from the Thanet Sand, pebbles of the Woolwich-and-Reading beds, and Tertiary ferruginous Sandstone (Diestian), with angular fragments of flint as well as whole flints.

In Otford Lane, near Halstead, on the other side of the Darent Valley, in the strawberry lands near Stockham Wood, a bed of entire or complete, dissolved-out, that is residual flints, occurs beneath the "red-clay-with-flints" with the thickness of three or four feet.

At Goodberry Farm, near Woodlands, there is no "redclay-with-flints," but undisturbed Woolwich-and-Reading red and buff clays, overspread with plateau drift flints.

But whatever the nature of the clay upon the chalk, the ochreous plateau drift always occurs above the clay and never in it.

In this red clay natural flint flakes appear quite white and soft. The reason given for this is that the alumina of the clay has such power to extract the water of crystallization

Hence the Eoliths are sometimes alluded to as "Old Brownies." + Geol. of London, vol. i, pp. 282-285 (Geol. Survey Memoir).

from the flint that the natural flint flakes in the clay are not stained but bleached, and are soft and light. They are also so completely desiccated by the clay that when placed in water they absorb it, and the air escaping through the water makes an effervescing sound.

The soft white flints in the red clay are quite different from the hard compact ochreous flints of the plateau gravels; and hence the red clay cannot have been the cause of the

brown stain.

§ VIII. The ferruginous gravel.-Specimens of plateau gravel from Madam's Court Hill and Shepherd's Barn, Shoreham, Kent, and from Blean near Canterbury, have on them evidences of having lain in a ferruginous matrix. Dr. Prestwich was much interested in these specimens. Mr. B. Harrison has also several, showing the same ferruginous incrustation upon them from the following localities in Kent, Parsonage Farm near Ash, Chimhams, between Kingsdown and Farningham, Terry's Lodge above Wrotham.

The distance from Blean to Madam's Court Hill is not less than forty miles.

It is evident, from the wide extent of the localities from which eoliths so encrusted have been obtained, that the ferruginous bed or probably iron pan, from which these eoliths and plateau gravels were derived, must have been of correspondingly wide extent on that now vanished Wealden range from which they have been carried by aqueous action in parallel directions.

It is remarkable that the gravel at Parsonage Farm, from which many eoliths have been obtained, and where special excavations were made at the suggestion of the British Association in 1894, is also of the same character above mentioned, viz., an iron pan so hard that it had to be broken with the pick-axe.

When we call to mind the very large number of fragments of ferruginous sandstone of Tertiary age which occur on and in the red-clay-with-flints, when we remember the ferruginous Diestian Sands at Lenham, Paddlesworth, and Les Noires Mottes, near Calais, we are strongly tempted to consider that these early Pliocene Crag beds, so widely extended in Pliocene times, must have been the source of the iron matrix in and from which, by percolation of water, these eoliths and gravels received their ochreous stain of

various tints.

The staining of flint is a somewhat obscure subject; but

its physical and chemical structure* may account for the varying tints assumed in the same staining medium.

It has been suggested by some that the Eoliths owe their colour to the local gravel in which some of them are found, but the conditions of the superficial deposits do not admit of this solution of the question.

§ IX. Eoliths their possible uses.-Eoliths group themselves into certain well-defined classes or types. These types, in some instances at least, bear rude resemblances to tools or weapons of which the use is known; but in others, beyond the chipped and battered edges, eolithic man has left little trace of his agency upon them. However, this uncertainty as to the intention of the makers and users of these implements need not trouble us, as there are many stone implements the applications of which are unknown.

§ X. The uses of some old Implements obscure.--Mr. W. J. Lewis Abbott has pointed out that the use of the small exquisitely worked trapezoidal Neoliths, from the Hastings Kitchen-Middens, the Valley of the Meuse, etc., has not been explained.

In Dr. Grierson's Museum, Thornhill, N.B., there are some long heavy stones, of modern date, bearing very little trace of man's handiwork, and yet they are known to have been used in the Orkneys in modern times as weights for tethering cows, a use no stranger would attribute to them from their shape.

The small stone balls with beautifully worked surfaces, from various parts of Scotland and Ireland, are of uncertain use. Even their age is doubtful.

*

Report of U.S. National Museum, 1897, Plates XVI-XIX.

The great variation in the intimate structure of flint is well illustrated by Mr. Thomas Wilson, Curator of the Division of Prehistoric Archæology, Smithsonian Institution, U.S.A. The mineralogical descriptions are by Dr. G. P. Merrill.

The English flints illustrated from the microscope in Plate XVI are from Brandon, Grimes Graves, and Dorchester (Dorset).

The specimen from Brandon, while generally chalcedonic in character, "shows minute amorphous yellowish and black particles, which are presumably ferruginous and carbonaceous matter." In other instances not English) he mentions chalcedonic silica with interstitial calcite. It is certain that flint, while mainly consisting of silica, is not homogeneous in structure, and therefore flints will lend themselves to the reception of ferruginous and other stain according to their varying composition and porosity.

+ Evans, Stone Implements, pp. 420-421. See also Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times (ed. 1883), pp. 122, 220, 232, 249, for implements of stone, bone, and bronze, of which the uses are unknown.

Recently, Mr. T. Wilson* has drawn attention to some very remarkable prehistoric implements, "principally from the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, all of flint in curious and rare forms, believed to be entirely without utility, and solely to gratify an artistic desire. None of them are spear or arrow-heads, and none of them appear to have been made for any service," unless indeed they were for personal wear

as totems.

It certainly is remarkable that so comparatively civilized a person as neolithic man, who in some localities was acquainted with agriculture, weaving, fishing, and such arts, should leave behind him any implements for which no use can now be suggested with any degree of certainty, although his arts in an improved manner are still those of civilization.

It is not to be wondered so much that Eolithic man, whose very home has disappeared from the face of the earth, should have left behind him tools for which, not being savages, we find it very difficult to suggest uses.

But it is not improbable that, his wants being reduced to their lowest terms, he clad himself in skins, used fire,† made use of wood and the sinews of animals for various primitive appliances; and in hunting, poison and pitfalls may have been the means of obtaining his ends rather than direct attack.

§ XI. Eoliths: their shapes and probable uses. We have evidence of the use by modern North American Indians of flint implements of the most primitive type. Prestwich figures one such which shows very little sign of work, but is of undoubted authenticity, as the following extract from his life§ shows. It occurs in a letter from Dr. Blackmore. "When I say 'implements,' the word would perhaps give a wrong impression, as the specimens found are rather natural or accidental forms of flint that have been taken up, used a few times and then thrown away, but the evidence of use to any one accustomed to the usual forms of flints is unmistakable. As far as I can judge, the early

* Report U.S. National Museum, 1897, p. 943, Plate XL.

+ Dr. H. P. Blackmore (Prestwich, Life, p. 376), has found evidence of fire in the gravels at Alderbury near Salisbury, from which eoliths (but not paleoliths) have been obtained.

Controverted Questions, p. 69.

Ibid., p. 363.