256 



implementa were extracted by Mr. Brown and Dr. Blackmore with their 

 own hands; and we all agreed with Mr. John Evans, who first described 

 these drifts, with regard to the inevitable conclusions which must be drawn 

 by any student of physical geology, as to the long distant period when 

 these human implements were rudely fashioned, and afterwards drifted into 

 their resting place, to become in future ages evidence and witnesses of the 

 existence'of God's reasoning creature, MAN. 



From Salisbury we also visited Hill Head, on the shores of Southampton 

 water, where other flint implements had been detected. Here Mr. Torke 

 obtained a specimen, which he presented to the museum in Jermyn-street 

 We also convinced ourselves that the deposits from which that flint weapon 

 was derived were transported when the physical and climatal conditions were 

 very different from the present, and when what is now the summit of a sea 

 cliff was the bed of a great river, or an estuary, over which flowed waters 

 charged with ice rafts, which melted and deposited large, drifted, angular, 

 blocks of Tertiary sandstone and quartzite in the gravel drift which contains 

 the implements, and which, doubtless, belongs to the liame geological epoch 

 as the old river shingles of Salisbury, which were deposited under very 

 different circumstances to those under which the Salisbury streams now 

 deposit their alluvia. These old rivers rolled down their courses in times 

 when every vale was filled, and every hill and eminence was covered with 

 snow and ice during the winter months, and when the waters roUed rapidly 

 under every summer's sun, carrying with them the eroded quartzite masses, 

 and the sharp, subangular, flints. And the inhabitants of the lands of those 

 times were the old men, and the mammoth, and the woolly rhinoceros, the 

 cave lion, the lemming, the marmot, and the Siberian hare. 



It was not then without much previous preparation and study among 

 the peculiar class of geological phenomena we wished to investigate, that we 

 determined to proceed to Belgium, to examine the geological conditions under 

 which the fossil remains of human beings had been found by Dr. Edouard 

 Dupont, of Dinant, in caves, in the carboniferous limestone which rises 

 above the river Lesse, which flows into the Meuse near Dinant, in the south 

 of Belgium. 



As my own notes are strictly confined to the geological phenomena we 

 observed, I will here quote from the daily journal kept by Sir Wm. Guise, 

 which he has kindly lent me, and in which descriptions' and details of the 

 scenery, as well as of the geology, are noted : — 



" In July we left Brussels for Namur, in company with our friend, 

 Mr. John Jones, formeily hon. sec. of the Cotteswold Club. From Namur 

 we proceeded to Dinant, accompanied by Mens. Dumont, engineer en chef of 

 the Province, to make the accquaintance of Dr. Dupont, who has superin- 

 tended the great cave excavations made under the auspices and with funds 

 supplied by the Belgian government. The river Lesse flows into the Meuse at 

 a distance of about 1^ miles from Dinant. Up the valley of the Lesse our 



