EXCURSION TO WALTON AND FRINTON. 11'J 



" I heartily endorse my friend Kennard's remarks as to the necessity of 

 employing caution in interpreting the uses of these primitive implements. I 

 do not however believe that the possibility of discovering their purpose is 

 quite so hopeless as he seems to think. If we can trace the evolution of any 

 of these implem.ents from the earliest to the latest periods of the Stone Age we 

 may yet do so, and such an evolution is, in my opinion, clearly observable in 

 the spokeshave — scraper group, the latter implement even having been 

 observed in use among modern savages. Now if we could connect the scraper 

 of the Eskimo and that of the Eolithic folk with an intermediate series of 

 intermediate age, would we not be justified in assuming that the use was the 

 same ? It is certainly unlikely that any radical change would take place in 

 the use of a particular type of implement. 



" However it has not been my intention to dogmatise in my explan- 

 ation of the uses of these implements, but rather to suggest. It is necessary 

 in a general and introductory paper of this description to give an idea of the 

 most probable way in which they would have been used, and that is all that 

 I have done. 



J. P. Johnson." 



WALTON AND FRINTON, ESSEX, IN 1902. 



REPORT OF THE EXCURSION OF THE CLUB, 7th JUNE, 



1902. 



By W. H. DALTON, F.G.S., Hon. Memb., E.F.C. 



The cliff-section of Walton-l\aze has been often described, 

 the richly-fossihferous sands of the Red Crag having constituted 

 it one of the " happy hunting grounds" of the collector for more 

 than half a century. Though but a few feet thick, it has been so 

 assiduously searched that a very large proportion of the fauna of 

 the Crag period has been found represented here. This is partly 

 due to the way in which the shells are protected from the solvent 

 action of percolating water by a thick bed of clay, capped in its 

 turn with several feet of gravel, and partly to its slight coherence 

 in comparison with that of the subjacent London-clay. This 

 may sound paradoxical, in view of the direct object of the 

 excursion, the study of the progressive degradation of the 

 London-clay itself. But it is merely a question of relative coher- 

 ence—loose sand above stiff clay — and the result is the forma- 

 tion of a sort ot shelf of the clay, from which rises a second and 

 steeper cliff, 15 or 20 yards inland of that which descends to the 

 beach. The shelf is much modified by slipping, and by the 

 erosion of channels for the escape of springs from the interior, 



