54 



Those picked up by myself were in the lower layers of 

 peat. But leaf-shaped arrow-heads certainly occur. No 

 indication of polishing has been observed. No metal has 

 been found, and no spindle-whorls. No beads, or glass, or 

 pottery. No bones of any description, and no implements 

 of bone, horn or wood. 



No flakes of greenstone or of volcanic rock have been 

 met with, nor any example of a stone that is not common 

 to the drift of the neighbourhood. 



It is necessary to mention the discovery of three finely 

 polished celts, one of flint and the others of greenstone. 



The flint axe was found near Wardle in a bed of gravel 

 on the bank of a stream. The two greenstone celts, 

 which seem never to have been used, and which bear to 

 each other an extraordinary resemblance, were found only 

 a few miles apart — one, buried under fragments of rock 

 in a quarry of millstone grit at Cudworth, in Saddleworth, 

 and the other, under two feet of peat, on a bed of marl 

 or clay, in the works for the Todmorden reservoirs, near 

 Eamsden Wood. These hatchets are clearly importations 

 into the district ; they are not connected in any way with 

 a true floor ; and they probably belong to a much later 

 period than that of the Neolithic stations of which we 

 are speaking. 



10. Signs of Antiquity — 



The floor is associated with a vegetation entirely differ- 

 ent from the present moorland growth. It occupies, in 

 many instances, the top of a conical hill, and yet it is 

 covered with a layer of peat from 4 to 10 feet in thickness. 

 A rounded and elevated and isolated surface is apparently 

 the last place on which one would expect to find a deep 

 deposit of peat, especially peat of which the lower stratum 

 has an intermixture of clay. 



It is difficult to avoid the inference that the present 

 conical hills which correspond so strikingly in altitude, 

 must have been part of a generally level country when 

 the deposit of peat began ; and that some of the smaller 

 river-valleys have been cut out since the Early Neolithic 

 floor was first used. 



The entire absence of bones, of pottery, of polished im- 

 plements, agrees with the assumption of a high antiquity. 



11. General conclusions — 



We know that in Neolithic times and in those places 

 where flint is geologically present, large quantities of flint 

 implements were made for barter and exportation ; as in 

 Wiltshire, for example, or in Antrim. 



