PREHISTORIC CLASSIFICATION 273 



of time : a certain school then sprung up which suggested 

 that the palaeolithic and neolithic might be separated and 

 bridged over by the glacial period (during which time it was 

 claimed Britain was uninhabited). But the then existing 

 predisposition towards the modernity of man would not allow 

 the idea. (Comparatively recent as the glacial period might 

 have been, it was altogether too long ago for man to have 

 been here ; and when implements were found in the Thames 

 valley, to make man post-glacial it was asserted that the 

 glacial deposits stopped on the Essex hills and at Finchley, 

 and never entered what is now the Thames valley. It counted 

 nothing that the glacial deposits at Finchley were not terminal 

 moraines, but chalky boulder clay, and when this was even 

 traced under Highgate into the Thames valley, underlying 

 redeposited London clay, the old prejudice was so strong that 

 the old ideas still held the field ! So firm was this hypothesis 

 maintained that papers describing chalky boulder clay with 

 northern erratics and fossils in the valley of the Thames were 

 refused to be printed by the Societies ! Since then the sections 

 at the Admiralty and in the Lea valley have shown how wrong 

 were these contentions.) 



I think it was my old friend Westropp who first suggested 

 to bridge over the gap, by the introduction of a " mesolithic " 

 age, his classification was as follows 1 : 



Rough flints. 



Flint flakes, flints chipped into shape. 



Implements ground at edge, or all over, and polished. 



Arrow- and spear-heads, swords and celts. 



Celts, spears, swords. 



Ingenious as this and its further subdivisions might have 

 been in the light of the knowledge he possessed, this latter was 

 altogether too small for so embracing a subject. The next, 

 I think, to advocate a mesolithic age was my old colleague 

 John Allen Brown 2 ; most of his specimens, however, we should 

 now regard as " surface palseoliths," of which some of us have 

 large collections. 



The question naturally asked was how it was that all 

 the palaeolithic implements were found in the gravels, and how 



1 Prehistoric Phases, p. xxiv. 



1 "Continuity of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic Periods," Jour. R.A.I, vol. xxii. 

 pp. 66-98. 



