Tlie Stone Ages of SontJi Africa. 71 



calcareous sandstone. At Cove Rock and Bat's Cave it abounds 

 with fossils, especially at the latter place. The peculiarities of the 

 stratification leave no doubt whatever that this is an eolian forma- 

 tion. Out of it I have taken three well-formed stone spear-heads 

 (knife-scrapers) at the level of low water, in a position where they 

 must at one time have been covered by 180 feet of this rock-drifted 

 sand which has become consolidated into hard rock, &c." 



Mr. McKay's contentions as to the extremely old origin of these 

 knife-scrapers, mullers, potsherds, &c., might at first sight appear 

 warranted were it not that the whole "outillage," or domestic 

 appliances pertain to the midden or shell-mound type, and as 

 I have endeavoured to show in another chapter, it is not in a 

 midden, always void of the Chellean or Acheulean as well as Mous- 

 terian bouchers, that we can expect to find a possible clue to the 

 antiquity of primitive man. 



But Mr. John Wood, of East London, has been kind enough to 

 send the following notes regarding the estuary of the Buffalo River : — 



" . . . . ; this would have been a revelation to the late Mr. 

 McKay, who thought that the stone implements found upon the 

 banks of the river among the fragments of sub-aerially decomposed 

 rock (which he seems to have regarded as river gravel) had been 

 dropped by the water margin and lain there — under a subsequent 

 covering of soil — throughout the period taken by the river to wear 

 its way down to its present level 80 to 100 feet below. He did not 

 know the old channel was still another 120 feet deeper down.''' My 

 notion is that implements dropped as they were being made on the 

 ground, and have gradually worked their way, assisted by well- 

 known agencies — through the 2 or 3 feet or so of soil there is, as 

 a rule here, covering the bedrock of the country. I have turned 

 up with the spade in my garden, which is close to the river, a 

 number of flaked stones, and once a nice 'rubbing stone.' 



" Another mistake I fancy Mr. McKay made was when comment- 

 ing upon the occurrence of stone implements along the beach near 

 Bat's Cove. His idea was that they had been dropped among the 

 pebbles at tidal mark and then overwhelmed in a mass of sand — 

 probably a dune of over 100 feet high judging from surroundings — 

 which was converted into eolian sandstone. But as the spot where 

 those implements and pebbles are found is a very circumscribed one, 

 I should say the explanation is that we are upon the site of an old 

 cave there, led up to by a gully or cove into which the waves heaped 



* A fact which came to light when the engineers bored for foundations for the 

 bridge placed across the Buffalo after MacKay's day. 



