1897] THE AUTHENTICITY OF PLATEAU MAN 331 
staining. The whole of the original surface is scratched, and the 
scratches sometimes extend over the edges and also cut across the 
surfaces left by the chips previously referred to. A dark brown, in 
parts fibrous, incrustation of silex thickly covers the original surface 
of this specimen. This was succeeded, after the glacial scratching, 
by a deposit of white silex filling up the hollows and scratches; the 
whole has been subsequently smoothed down and polished by blown 
sand. This specimen was dug from one of the pits in the Plateau 
gravel in 1896, 
These four specimens illustrate the main process which the flints 
have undergone. They show that the chippings were not all formed 
at one period, a fact which it seems to me is quite inconsistent with 
the theory that they were artificially shaped by man. The objection 
seems especially convincing as, according to the advocates of that 
theory, all the shaping must have been done before the flints were 
imbedded in the gravel in which they now occur. If the flints were 
worked, used, and then thrown down again, we should expect to find 
them widely scattered over the surface as is the case with palaeo- 
lithic and neolithic implements. What possible agency could have 
picked them all off the surface and collected them together into this 
gravel bed? Further, we are told that the shaping and working of 
the flints by man “had taken place before the flint entered into the 
remarkable deposit which so altered the surface of the stone, and 
changed its colour into that characteristic dark-brown.” 1! So accord- 
ing to the theory, the flints were first chipped into shape, and then 
carried into the plateau gravel. They were coloured subsequently, 
and the deposition of the siliceous encrustations, the glacial scratching, 
and the sand polishing all took place while the flints were in the 
gravel in which they now lie. 
Another objection to the human working of these flints is the 
uselessness of the shapes into which they have been made.  Flints 
often break naturally into a triangular form, and as the chipping 
has mainly acted on thin edges, abundant examples of pointed forms 
are found. Some of these resemble in outline the implements of 
later dates, but all the details of the flaking are different. Less 
importance is apparently placed on these triangular flints than on 
those with concave edges, which are supposed to have been used 
as flesh-scrapers. Some of the South Sea Islanders have, it is true, 
been observed scraping their limbs with stones; but we can hardly 
suppose that such vast numbers of these concave flints would have 
been required by the plateau folk for this purpose, especially as they 
would never wear out, and one would last for an indefinite time. 
The chipping in some cases has not only been useless, but has 
even spoilt stones that might otherwise have been useful. Some of 
1 Nat. Sci., April 1894, p. 259. 
