276 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



or philosophic reasoning to realise that the acheulian and 

 chellian industries — the constituents of Lubbock's palaeo- 

 lithic period — did not represent man's first essays at flint 

 working, and accordingly Gabriel de Mortilet proposed the 

 term " eolithic " for certain flints which he considered bore 

 evidence of man's work. But the idea of an intelligent being 

 at so early a geological date as the deposits in which the flints 

 were found received but little favour with many prehistorians. 

 Later John Allen Brown reintroduced the term eolithic with 

 more success for the worked flints from the S.E. plateaux. 

 It was when the writer was first showing him some of these 

 plateau things that he exclaimed " we have here the dawn 

 of the stone age — the eolithic period." He was then reminded 

 that it was already a preoccupied and presumptuous term ; 

 but he persisted in its application, and many have since fol- 

 lowed in his lead. 



Unfortunately the date of the plateau deposits in which 

 the first evidence of intentional chipping was found has not 

 been universally accepted ; naturally the implements occur 

 in beds which have generally been relaid several times. That 

 the first of these are of pliocene age the writer has recently 

 tried to show, 1 and fortunately most of his co-workers have 

 accepted the assignment. 



Within the last ten years an epoch-making series of worked 

 flints have been found in East Anglia by Messrs. Reid Moir, 

 Clarke, Underwood, and others : from the positions in which 

 these are found they appear to belong to three horizons : 



III. Below the Norwich Crag (the norwichian). 

 II. Below the Red Crag (the ipswichian). 

 I. Below the White Crag (the suttonian). 



There are so many facts pointing to their belonging to 

 three separate ages, which cannot be gone into here, that I 

 think we may regard them as such. The suttonian would 

 thus be pre-coralline, perhaps equivalent to the Lenham- 

 Diestian of Kent, Surrey, and Sussex, antedating the invasion 

 of the eastern counties by the Coralline Sea. We are then 

 confronted with the questions : What is the age of the oldest 



1 "The Pliocene Deposits of S.-E. England," Proc. P.S. E. Anglia, vol. ii. 

 part ii. pp. 175-94- 



