76 



the peat or forest bed of the Thames marshes are 

 apparently of the polished types. 



I find, therefore, that the surface deposits of the dis- 

 trict, sp far as they have been examined, exhibit evidence 

 of an early and a continuous occupation of the country by 

 man until now, and I see no cause to doubt that it was so 

 occupied. Looking at the whole series ot implements from 

 the most ancient stratigraphically to the most recent, and 

 carefully comparing the simplest and ^most homely series 

 and that of the most elaborate and larger implements, I 

 am unable to draw a sharp line of demarkation in time or 

 type which wholly separates palaeolithic from neolithic 

 implements, that is, without doing violence to the series 

 found, by ignoring intermediate varieties and omitting 

 intentionally those which bridge over the line of separation. 

 So gentle and almost insensible is the passage from one 

 marked type to another, and so many types branch out 

 from this onward passage, that it is rather from the 

 abundance than the paucity of kinds that the difficulty in 

 definition arises. Besides there is no evidence in the 

 deposits of a cessation of the practice of flint chipping, on 

 the contrary, all of them contain at the least, waster flakes 

 and minor tools, which, there is no reason to doubt, are 

 contemporaneous with the layers in which they lie. 



The art of chipping appears to have been already 

 perfected in the examples derived from our oldest deposits, 

 and to have died out with the cessation of Gun flint 

 manufacture once so largely carried on near Gravesend. 

 As implements derived from a higher level may be, and 

 are found in deposit at a lower level, so at the lowest 

 levels of the Medway and the Thames, and in the latest 

 gravels which form their present beds, the implements of 

 all ages may lie side by side, some of them worn almost 

 out of recognition and some still looking cleanly chipped ; 

 yet those which still appear newly chipped may have fallen 

 down or been pushed by ice from beds older than those 

 now being laid, whose contemporaneously included imple- 



